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ENGLISH LITERATURE 



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ENGLISH LITERATURE 



BY 



STOPFORD A. BROOKE, M.A. 



^^'^^o^^^'s'^, 






THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
189; 

All rights reserved 






Copyright, 1896, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



J. 8. CuBhing & Co. — Berwick & Smith 
Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 






4 

4 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

English Literature before the Norman Conquest, 

670-1066 I 

CHAPTER H 
From the Conquest to Chaucer's Death, 1066-1400 . 32 

CHAPTER HI 
From Chaucer's Death to Elizabeth, 1400- 1558 . . 72 

CHAPTER IV 

The Reign of Elizabeth, i 558-1 603 .... 98 

CHAPTER V 

From Elizabeth's Death to the Restoration, 1603- 

1660 . 150 

CPIAPTER VI 

From the Restoration to the Death of Pope and 

Swift, i 660-1 745 . . . " 170 



VI CONTENTS 

CHAPTER VII 

PAGE 

Prose Literature from the Death of Pope and Swift 
TO THE French Revolution, and from the French 
Revolution to the Death of Scott, 1745-1832 . 196 

CHAPTER VIII 
Poetry from i 730-1 832 213 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 

CHAPTER I 

WRITERS BEFORE THE NORMAX CONQUEST, 67O-I066 

I. The History of English Literature is the story 
of what great Enghsh men and women thought and felt, 
and then wrote down in good prose and beautiful poetry 
in the EngHsh language. The story is a long one. It 
begins in England about the year 670; it had its un- 
written beginnings still earlier on the Continent, in the 
old Angle- Land; it was still going on in the year which 
closes this book, 1832 ; nor has our literature lost any of 
its creative force in the years which have followed 1832. 
Into this little book then is to be briefly put the story of 
nearly 1200 years of the thoughts, feelings, and imagina- 
tion of a great people. Every English man and woman 
has good reason to be proud of the work done by their 
forefathers in prose and poetry. Every one who can 
write a good book or a good song may say to himself, 
" I belong to a noble company, which has been teaching 



2 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

and delighting the world for more than looo years." 
And that is a fact in which those who write and those 
who read English literature ought to feel a noble pride. 

2. The English and the Welsh. — This literature is 
written in Enghsh^ the tongue of our fathers. They 
lived, while this island of ours was still called Britain, in 
North and South Denmark, in Hanover and Friesland — 
Jutes, Angles, and Saxons. Their common tongue and 
name were English; but, either because they were 
pressed from the inland, perhaps by Attila, or for pure 
love of adventure, they took to the sea, and, landing at 
various parts of Britain at various times, drove back, 
after 150 years of hard fighting, the Britons, whom they 
called Welsh, to the land now called Wales, to Strath- 
clyde, and to Cornwall. It is well for those who study 
Enghsh Hterature to remember that in these places 
the Britons remained as a distinct race with a distinct 
literature of their own, because the stories and the poetry 
of the Britons crept afterwards into Enghsh literature 
and had a great influence upon it. ^Moreover, in the 
later days of the Conquest, a great number of the Welsh 
were amalgamated with the English. The whole tale of 
King Arthur, of which English poetry and even English 
prose is so full, was a British tale. Some then of the 
imaginative work of the conquered afterwards took cap- 
tive their fierce conquerors. 

3. The English Tongue. — The earhest form of our 
English tongue is very different from modern Enghsh in 
form, pronunciation, and appearance ; but still the Ian- 



I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 3 

guage written in the year 700 is the same as that in 
which the prose of the Bible is written, just as much as 
the tree planted a hundred years ago is the same tree 
to-day. It is this sameness of language, as well as the 
sameness of national spirit, which makes our literature 
one Hterature for 1200 years. 

4. Of English Literature written in this tongue we 
have no extant prose until the time of King ^^Ifred. 
jNIen hke B^da and Ealdhelm wrote their prose in 
Latin. But we have, in a few manuscripts, a great deal 
of poetry written in Enghsh, chiefly before the days 
of Alfred. There is (i) the MS. under the name of 
Ccedmon's Paraphrase, a collection of rehgious poems 
by various writers, now in the Bodleian. There is (2) 
the MS. oi Beowulf and of the last three books of 
Judith, There is (3) the Exeter Book, a miscellaneous 
collection of poems, left by Leofric, Bishop of Exeter, to 
his cathedral church in the year 107 1. There is (4) the 
Vercelli Book, discovered at Vercelh in the year 1822, in 
which, along with homihes, there is a collection of six 
poems. A few leaflets complete the hst of the }vISS. 
containing poems earher than Alfred. All together they 
constitute a vernacular poetry which consists of more 
than twenty thousand lines. 

5. The metre of the poems is essentially the same, un- 
hke any modern metre, without rhyme, and without any 
fixed number of syllables. Its essential elements were 
accent and alliteration. Every verse is divided into two 
half-verses by a pause, and has four accented syllables. 



4 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

while the number of unaccented syllables is indifferent. 
These half-verses are linked together by alliteration. The 
two accented syllables of the first half, and one of the 
accented syllables in the second half, begin with the same 
consonant, or with vowels which were generally different 
one from another. This is the formal rule. But to give 
a greater freedom there is often only one alliterative 
letter in the first half-verse. Here is an example of the 
usual form : — 

And ^eaw-i/rias : on dsegc weor'Se'S 
Winde geondsawen. 

And the ^ew-^ownfall : at the </ay-break is 
Winnowed by the wind. 

This metre was continually varied, and was capable, 
chiefly by the addition of unaccented syllables, of many 
harmonious changes. The length of the lines depended 
on the nature of the things described, or on the rise and 
fall of the singer's emotion ; the emphatic words in which 
the chief thought lay were accented and alliterated, and 
probably received an additional force by the beat of the 
hand upon the harp. All the poetry was sung, and the 
poet could alter, as he sang, the movement of the verse. 
But, however the metre was varied, it was not varied 
arbitrarily. It followed clear rules, and all its develop- 
ments were built on the simple original type of four 
accents and three alUterated syllables. This was the 
vehicle, interspersed with some rare instances in which 
rhymes were employed, in which all English poetry was 



I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 5 

sung and written till the French system of rhymes, metres, 
and accents was transferred to the Enghsh tongue ; and 
it continued, alongside of the French system, to be used, 
sometimes much and sometimes little, until the sixteenth 
century. Nor, though its use was finished then, was its 
influence lost. Its habits, especially aUiteration, have 
entered into all Enghsh poetry. 

6. The Characters of this Poetry. — (i) It is marked 
by parallehsm. It frequently repeats the same statement 
or thought in different ways. But this is not so common 
as it is, for example, in Hebrew poetry. (2) It uses 
the ordinary metaphorical phrases of Teutonic poetry, 
such as the whale' s-7'oad for the sea, but uses them with 
greater moderation or with less inventiveness than the 
Icelandic poets. Elaborate similes are not found in the 
earlier poetry, but later poets, Cynewulf especially, invent 
them, not frequently, but well. (3) A great variety of 
compound words, chiefly adjectives, also characterise it, 
by the use of which the poet strove to express with 
brevity a number of qualities belonging to his subject. 
When Tennyson used such adjectives as hollow -vaulted^ 
daijity -woeful^ he was returning to the custom of his 
ancient predecessors. (4) At times the poetry is con- 
cise and direct, but this is chiefly found in those parts 
of the poems which have some relation to heathen 
times. For the most part, save when the subject is 
war or sea-voyaging, the poetry is diffuse, and wearies 
by a constant repetition. But we owe a great deal of 
this repetition to the introduction of extempore matter 



6 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

by the bards as they sung. There is not much of it in 
poems which have been carefully edited, as many were 
in the time of Alfred. Nor do I think that the original 
lays which the bards expanded were more diffuse than 
the early Icelandic lays. (5) It is the earliest extant 
body of poetry in any modern language. It began to 
be written in England towards the close of the seventh 
century, and all its best work was done before the close 
of the eighth. (6) Its width of range is very remarkable. 
The epic is represented in it by Beozvulf. Judith is an 
heroic saga. The earlier Genesis is a paraphrase with 
original episodes. The later Genesis is an epic fragment 
with dramatic conversations, and in other poems there 
are traces of what might have formed a basis for a 
dramatic literature. The Exodns is an heroic narrative, 
freely invented on the BibHcal story. The Christ of 
Cynewulf is a threefold poem, conceived like a trilogy, 
in the honour of Christ, the Hero. Narrative poetry is 
represented by Cynevvulf's poems of the life of Saint 
GuSlac, of the martyrdom of Saint Juliana, by the Elene 
and the Andreas. There is one pure lyric, and there 
are sacred hymns of joy among Cynevvulf's poems which 
have all the quahty of lyrics. There are five elegiac 
poems. There are a number of Riddles, some of 
which are poems of pure natural description. There 
are didactic, gnomic, and allegorical poems. Almost 
every form of poetry is represented. (7) It is the 
only early poetry which has poems wholly dedicated to 
descriptions of nature. Of such descriptions there is no 



I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST / 

trace in the Icelandic poetry. For anything resembhng 
them we must look forward to the mneteenth century. 
(8) Z\Iany of the poems are extraordinarily modern in 
feeling. The hymns of Cynewulf might have been writ- 
ten by Crashaw, The sentiment of the Wandere?' and the 
Ruin might belong to this century. The Seafarer has 
the same note of feeling for the sea which prevails in 
the sea-poetry of Swinburne and Tennyson. (9) There 
is no trace of any Xorse influence or religion on early 
English poetry. Old Saxon poetry influenced the later 
English verse, but may itself have been derived from 
England. The poetry of natural description owes much 
to the Celtic influence which was largely present in 
Northumbrian but otherwise there is no Celtic note in 
early English poetry. There is a classic note. Virgil 
and other Latin poets were read by those whom Baeda 
taught, and the ancient models had their wonted power. 
The unexpected strain of culture, so remarkable in this 
poetry, must, I think, be due to this influence. (10) 
The greater part of this poetry was written in Nor- 
thumbria, and before the coming of the Danes. This has 
been questioned, but it seems not wisely. The only 
examples of any importance outside of this statement 
are the war-lyrics in the Chronicle and that portion 
of the Caedmonic poems which it is now beheved was 
translated from an Old Saxon original, probably in the 
time of Alfred. 

7. The First English Poems. — Our forefathers, while 
as yet they were heathen and lived on the Continent, 



5 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

made poems, and of this poetry we may possess a few 
remains. The earhest is The Song of the Traveller — 
Widsith, the far-goer — but it has been filled up by 
later insertions. It is not much more than a catalogue 
of the folk and the places whither the minstrel said he 
went with the Goths, but when he expands concerning 
himself, he shows so pleasant a pride in his art that 
he wins our sympathy. Dear's Complaint is another 
of these poems. Its form is that of a true lyric. The 
writer is a bard at the cotirt of the Heodenings, from 
whom his rival takes his place and goods. He writes 
this complaint to comfort his heart. Weland, Beado- 
hild, Theodric knew care and sorrow. ^' That they 
overwent, this also may I." This is the refrain of all 
the verses of our first, and, I may say, our only early 
English lyric. The Fight at Finsbtng is an epic frag- 
ment. It tells, and with all the fire of war, of the 
attack on Fin's palace in Friesland, and another part 
of the same story is to be found in Beowulf. It is 
plain there was a full Fin- saga, portions of which were 
sung at feasts. This completes, with those parts of 
Beowulf which we may refer to heathen traditionary 
songs, the list of the English poetry which we may 
possibly say belonged to the older England over seas. 
There are two fragments of a romance of Waldhcre 
of the date or place of which we know nothing. In 
the so-called Rune Song — which, as we have it, is not 
old — there is one verse at least which alludes to the 
times of the heroic sagas. But the poems where we 



I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST Q 

find most traces of early English paganism are the 
so-called Charms. 

8. Beowulf is our old English epic, and it recounts 
the great deeds and death of Beowulf. It may have 
arisen before the English conquest of Britain in the 
shape of short songs about the hero, and we can trace, 
perhaps, three different centres for the story. The 
scenery is laid among the Danes in Seeland and among 
the Geats in South Sweden, on the coast of the North 
Sea and the Kattegat. Theie. isnot a w^ord about our 
England in the poem. Coming to England in the form 
of short poems, it was wrought together into a complete 
tale of two parts, the first of which we may again divide 
into two ; and was afterwards edited, with a few Chris- 
tian appHcations, and probably by a Northumbrian poet, 
in the eighth century. In this form we possess it. 

The story is of Hrothgar, one of the kingly race of 
Jutland, who builds his hall, Heorot, near the sea, on 
the edge of the mxoorland. K monster called Grendel, 
half-human, half-fiend, dwells in a sea-cave, near the 
moor over which he wanders by night, and hating the 
festive noise, carries off thirty of the thegns of Hrothgar 
and devours them. He then haunts the hall at night, 
and after twelve years of this distress, Beowulf, thegn of 
Hygelac, sails from Sweden to bring help to Hrothgar, 
and at night, when Grendel breaks into the hall, wrestles 
with him, tears away his arm, and the fiend flies away 
to die. The second division of the first part of the 
poem begins with the vengeance taken by Grendel's 



lO ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

mother. She slays .-Eschere, a trusty thegn of Hroth- 
gar. Then Beowulf descends into her sea-cave and 
slays her also ; feasts in triumph with Hrothgar, and 
returns to his own land. The second part of the poem 
opens fifty years later. Beowulf is now king ; his land 
is happy under his rule. But his fate is at hand. A 
fire-drake, who guards a treasure, is robbed and comes 
from his den to harry and burn the country. The gray- 
haired king goes forth to fight his last fight, slays the 
dragon, but dies of its fiery breath, and the poem closes 
with the tale of his burial^ burned on a lofty pyre on 
the top of Hronesuces. 

Its social interest hes in what it tells us of the man- 
ners and customs of our forefathers before they came 
to England. Their mode of life in peace and war is 
described ; their ships, their towns, the scenery in which 
they lived, their feasts, amusements — we have the ac- 
count of a whole day from morning to night — the close 
union between the chieftain and his war-brothers ; their 
women and the reverence given them ; the way in which 
they faced death, in which they sang, in which they gave 
gifts and rewards. The story is told with Homeric direct- 
ness and simplicity, but not with Homeric rapidity. A 
deep fatalism broods over it. ^' Wyrd (the fate-goddess) 
goes ever as it must," Beowulf says, when he thinks he 
may be torn to pieces by Grendel. " It shall be," he 
cries when he goes to fight the dragon, ^^ for us in the 
fight as Wyrd shall foresee." But a daring spirit fills 
the fatalism. ^' Let him who can," he says, " gain honour 



/ EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST II 

ere he die." ^^ Let us have fame or death." Out of the 
fatalism naturally grew the dignity and much of the 
pathos of the poem. It is most poetical in the vivid 
character-drawing of men and women, and especially 
in the character of the hero, both in his youth and in 
his agej. in the fateful pathos of the old man's last 
fight for his country against certain death, in the noble 
scene of the burial, in the versing of the grave and 
courteous interchange of human feeling between the 
personages. Moreover, the descriptions of the sea and 
the voyage, and of the savage places of the cliffs and 
the moor, are instinct with the spirit which is still alive 
among our poetry, and which makes dreadful and lonely 
wildernesses seem dwelt in — as if the places needed a 
king — by monstrous beings. In the creation of Gren- 
del and his mother, the savage stalkers of the moor, 
that half-natural, half-supernatural world began, which, 
when men grew gentler and the country more cultivated, 
became so beautiful as fairyland. Here is the descrip- 
tion of the dwelling-place of Grendel : — 

There the land is hid in gloom, 
Where they ward; wolf-haunted slopes, windy headlands 

o'er the sea. 
Fearful is the marish-path, where the mountain torrent 
'Xeath the Nesses' mist, nither makes its way. 
Under earth the flood is, not afar from here it lies; 
But the measure of a mile, where the mere is set. 
Over it, outreaching, hang the ice-nipt trees : 
Held by roots the holt is fast, and o'er-helms the water. 



12 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

There an evil wonder, every night, a man may see — 
In the flood a tire ! 

Not unhaunted is the place ! 
Thence the welter of the waves is upwhirled on high. 
Wan towards the clouds, when the wind is stirring 
Wicked weather up; till the lift is waxing dark, 
And the welkin weeping ! 

The whole poem, Pagan as it is, is Enghsh to its very root. 
It is sacred to us, our Genesis, the book of our origins. 

9. Christianity and English Poetry. — \Vhen we came 
to Britain we were great warriors and great sea pirates 
— ^' sea wolves," as a Roman poet calls us; and all our 
poetry down to the present day is full of war, and still 
more of the sea. No nation has ever written so much 
sea- poetry. But we were more than mere warriors. We 
were a home-loving people when we got settled either in 
Sleswick or in England, and all our literature from the 
first writings to the last is full of domestic love, the dear- 
ness of home, and the ties of kinsfolk. We were a re- 
ligious people, even as heathen, still more so when we 
became Christian, and our poetry is as much of religion 
as of war. But with Christianity a new spirit entered 
into English poetry. The war spirit did not decay, but 
into the song steals a softer element. The fatahsm is 
modified by the faith that the fate is the will of a good 
(}od. The sorrow is not less, but it is relieved by an on- 
look of joy. The triumph over enemies is not less, but 
even more exulting, for it is the triumph of God over His 
foes that is sung by Csedmon and Cynewulf. Nor is the 



EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 1 3 

imaginative delight in legends and in the supernatural 
less. But it is now found in the legends of the saints, in 
the miracles and visions of angels that Baeda tehs of the 
Christian heroes, in fantastic allegories of spiritual things, 
like the poems of the FJicenix and the JVhale. The love 
of nature lasted, but it dwells now rather on gentle than 
on savage scenery. The human sorrow for the hardness 
of life is more tender, and when the poems speak of the 
love of home, it is with an added grace. One little bit 
still lives for us out of the older world. 

Dear the welcomed one 
To his Frisian wife, when his Floater's drawn on shore, 
When his keel comes back, and her man returns to home ; 
Hers, her own food-giver. And she prays him in, 
Washes then his weedy coat, and new weeds puts on him ! 
O lythe it is on land to him whom his love constrains. 

If that was the soft note of home in a Pagan time, it 
was softer still when Christianity had mellowed manners. 

Yet, with all this, the ancient faith still influences the 
Christian song. Christ is not only the Saviour, but the 
Hero who goes forth against the dragon. His overthrow 
of the fiends is described in much the same terms as that 
of Beowulf's wrestling with Grendel. '^ Bitterly grim, 
gripped them in his wrath." The death of Christ, at 
which the universe trembles and weeps, was mixed up 
afterwards with the story of the death of Balder. The 
old poetry penetrated the new, but the spirit of the new 
transformed that of the old. 



14 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAPo 

lo. Caedmon. — The poem of Beowulf has the grave 
Teutonic power, but it is not, as a whole, native to our 
soil. It is not the first true English poem. That is the 
work of C^DMON, and it was done in Northurabria. The 
story of it, as told by Baeda, proves that the making of 
songs was common at the time. Caedmon was a servant 
to the monastery of Hild, an abbess of royal blood, at 
Whitby in Yorkshire. He was somewhat aged when the 
gift of song came to him, and he knew nothing of the 
art of verse, so that at the feasts when for the sake of 
mirth all sang in turn he left the table. One evening, 
having done so and gone to the stables, for he had the care 
of the cattle that night, he fell asleep, and One came to 
him in vision and said, '' Caedmon, sing me some song." 
And he answered, '' I cannot sing ; for this cause I left 
the feast and came hither." Then said the other, "How- 
ever, you shall sing." "What shall I sing ?" he replied. 
" Sing the beginning of created things," answered the 
other. Whereupon he began to sing verses to the praise 
of God, and, awaking, remembered what he had sung, 
and added more in verse worthy of God. In the morn- 
ing he came to the town-reeve, and told him of the gift 
he had received, and, being brought to Hild, was ordered 
to tell his dream before learned men, that they might 
give judgment whence his verses came. And when they 
had heard, they all said that heavenly grace had been 
conferred on him by our Lord. This story ought to be 
loved by us, for it tells of the beginning in England of 
the wonderful life of EngHsh Poetry. Nor should we 



I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 1 5 

fail to reverence the place where it began. Above the 
small and land-locked harbour of Whitby rises and juts 
out towards the sea the dark cliif where Hild's monastery 
stood, looking out over the German Ocean. It is a wild, 
wind-swept upland, above the furious sea ; and standing 
there we feel that it is a fitting birthplace for the poetry 
of the sea-ruling nation. Nor is the verse of the first 
poet without the stormy note of the sea-scenery among 
which it was written, nor without the love of the stars and 
the high moorlands that Csedmon saw from Whitby Head. 
Caedmon's poems were done before 680, in which year 
he died. Baeda tells us that he sang the story of Genesis 
and Exodus, many other tales in the Sacred Scriptures, 
and the story of Christ and the Apostles and of Heaven 
and Hell to come. "Others after him tried to make 
rehgious poems, but none could compare with him for he 
learnt the art of song not from men, but, divinely aided, 
received that gift." It is plain then that he was the 
founder of a school. It is equally plain, it seems, from 
this passage, that at Baeda's death the later school of 
religious poets, of whom Cynewulf was the chief, had not 
begun to write. Caedmon's poems, then, were widely 
known. Baeda quotes their first verses. They were 
copied from monastery to monastery. Alfred got them 
from the north, and no doubt gave them to the great 
schools at Winchester. They were however lost. Only 
their fame survived. 

II. The Junian Caedmon. — Archbishop Ussher, hunt- 
ing for books for Trinity College, Dubhn, found an Old 



l6 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

English MS. which Francis Dujon (Junius) printed in 
Amsterdam about 1650, and pubUshed as the work of 
Caedmon, because its contents agreed with Baeda's de- 
scription of Caedmon's poems and of his first hymn. 
Junius was a friend of Milton, and Milton was one of the 
first to hear what the earhest English poet was supposed 
to have written on the Fall of the Angels and the Fall of 
Man. Since then critics have wrought their will upon 
this MS. Some say that Caedmon did not write a line of 
it ; others allow him some share in it. It pleases us to 
think, and the judgment is possible, that the more 
archaic portion of the first poem in the MS. — the Genesis 
— which describes the Fall of the Angels and the Crea- 
tion, the Flood, and perhaps the battle of Abraham with 
the kings of the East is by Caedmon himself. In the 
midst of the Genesis there is however a second descrip- 
tion of the Fall of the Angels and an elaborate account of 
the council in Hell, and of the temptation in the Garden. 
This is held to be an after-insertion, made perhaps in the 
time of Alfred. It differs in feeling, in subtlety, and in 
manner of verse from the rest. A conjecture was made 
that it was a translation of a part of an Old Saxon poem, 
and this seems to be borne out by the discovery in 1894 
of a fragment of Old Saxon poetry in which there are 
lines similar to those of this separated portion of the 
Ge?iesis, The next poem in the MS. is the Exodus. It 
is certainly not by Caedmon. It is not a paraphrase ; it 
is a triumphal poem of war, boldly invented, on the pas- 
sage of the Red Sea. The Daniel, the third poem of the 



I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 1/ 

MS., is so dull that it is no matter who wrote it or when 
it was written. The second part of the ]\IS. is in a differ- 
ent handwriting from the first, and is a series of Psalm- 
like poems on the Fall of the Angels, the Harrowing of 
Hell, the Resurrection, Ascension, Pentecost, the Judg- 
ment Day, and the Temptation. They are a kind of 
Paradise Regained, 

12. The interest of these poems is not found in any 
paraphrase of the Scriptures, but in those parts of them 
which are the invention of the poets, in the drawing of 
the characters, in the passages instinct with the genius of 
our race, and with the individuality of the writers. The 
account of the creation in the older Genesis has the 
grandeur of a nature-myth. The description of the flood 
is full of the experience of one who had known the sea in 
storm. The battle of Abraham is a fine clash of war, and 
might be the description of the repulse by some Nor- 
thumbrian king of the northern tribes. The ruin of the 
angels and the peace of Heaven, set in contrast, have the 
same kind of proud pathos as ]\Iilton's work on the same 
subject. The later Genesis is even more Teutonic than 
the first. Satan's fierce cry of wrath and freedom against 
God from his bed of chains in Hell is out of the heart of 
heathendom. The northern rage of war and the northern 
tie of war-brotherhood speak in all he says, in all that his 
thegns reply. The pleasure of the northern imagination 
in swiftness and joy is just as marked as its pleasure in 
dark pride and in revenge. The burst of exulting ven- 
geance when the thegn of Satan succeeds in the tempta^ 
c 



l8 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

tion is magnificent. His master, he cries, will lie softly 
and be blithe of heart in the dusky fire, now that his 
revenge is gained. There is true dramatic power in the 
dialogue between Eve and the fiend, and so much subtlety 
of thought that it cannot belong to Ccsdmon's time. It is 
characteristic of Teutonic manners that the motives of 
the woman for eating the fruit are all good, and the pas- 
sionate and tender conscientiousness of the love and 
repentance of Adam and Eve is equally characteristic of 
the gentler and more religious side of the Teutonic 
nature. ^^ Dark and true and tender is the North." 

The Exodus is remarkable for its descriptions of war 
and a marching host, and especially for the elaborate 
painting of the breaking up of the sea, which was prob- 
ably done by one who had himself battled with a whirling 
gale on the German Ocean. On the whole, we have in 
the two parts of the Genesis^ and in the Exodus^ in the 
midst of spaces of dulness, original and imaginative 
pieces of poetry well worthy of the beginnings of English 
song. 

13. English in the South. — While Caedmon was still 
alive, Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, and his sub- 
deacon Hadrian set up a celebrated school of learning at 
Canterbury, which flourished for a short time and then 
decayed. One of Theodore's scholars was Ealdhelm. 
A young man when Caedmon died in 680, his name is 
connected with Enghsh poetry. As Abbot of JMalmes- 
bury and Bishop of Sherborne he spread the learning of 
Canterbury over the south of England, and sent his in- 



I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST I9 

fluence into Northumbria, where his Riddles were imi- 
tated by Cynewulf. But our chief interest in him is that 
he was himself an Enghsh poet. It is said that he had 
not his equal in the making and singing of Enghsh verse. 
One of his songs was popular in the twelfth century. 
zElfred had some in his possession, and a pretty story 
tehs that when the traders came into the towns, Eald- 
helm used, like a gleeman, to stand on the bridge or the 
public way and sing songs to them in the English tongue, 
that he might lure them by the sweetness of his speech 
to hear the word of God. 

14. English Poetry in the North after Caedmon — 
** Judith.'*— We have seen that Enghsh poetry began 
with religion in the poems of C^dmon, and the greater 
part of the written poetry which followed him is also 
religious. One of the best of these pieces is \hQ Judith, 
Originally composed in twelve books, we only possess 
the three last which tell of the banquet of Holofernes, 
his slaughter, and the attack of the Jews on the Assyrian 
camp. It is a poem made after Baeda's death, full of 
the flame and joy of war. Nor is the drawing of the 
person and character of Judith unworthy of a race which 
has always honoured women. She stands forth clear, 
a Jewish Velleda. To call the poem, however, as some 
have done, the finest of the Old Enghsh poems, is to 
say a great deal too much. We may date, about the 
same time, in the eighth century, a fine fragment on the 
Harrowing of Hell, some poems on Christian legends, 
perhaps the allegorical poems of the Whale and the 



20 



C3aip» 



Panther^ and some IjrricRl ':: 
the Kentish and ^"^'e?^ S' j: : :' 

15. Tliere are t--- I'.-z^-i :. 
from, their excellence deserve 
rest of the minor poems, T:. 
called the Ruin. It k tht ::. : 
a desolated city, and cert^i 1 
that the dty was Ti:': :::t:. 
in 577. If 5O5 LJ-r iiTt :. : 
676 whoi Qsiic foe^ded a :: : 
and 781 when Ofik rehTd'.: -..- 
Wanderer^ ezqs^ands the ir. : :::. 
over the desolation of ::.t - :. :_ 
have been originally a iiei: ti 
with a Christian P::]: r :e : 1 : ! 
English poems it _e ::.7 :i: :: . 
noble piece of work i: :: Zi : 
an exile bewails Ms O"':. . : : : :. : 
fal iaX^s of men. T'z.z :: : : 
a dialogue between ar. : ^ : : :: : 
dangers and the fasdnar::. 
spirit which fiHed the hear: :' 
sang and sailed, and is ei::: 
The blank- verse man't: ::' 7i 
spirit of it is strangT t - 
The same may be si 
Wife's Complaint and tht _t^ 
are not of so f'^ 
Seafarer, but th.: .. : _ . 



. :' "'- ese has been 
ravcifcr orer 

: :: : zeeai to dbow 
'leanliii 

ery amofi^ flie minSp 
H^ second, the 

:: : r.-e '' ^ die JSkok 

: - i . :: r;:m. It iiS2Dy 

T : " T 1 : : : envaii^ 



:5 grave and fetelalversr 



il^ and tbe 

": ■' r ..^^. 

T - ts — tlae 

Tnef 

: : he 



I 



-.:TZ?.S to the CT:rOVE5T 21 



the First Riddle, As re—n: v -terTre:^ :: 5 : ^l 
be known as Wulf Er.:'\.r:r\ 

16. Cynewulf was :t .: : t : :f t :: :: t::: s-^ers, 
and wrote, z::s: pe: t :^ : : r :hr Larer haV cf 
the eighth cemMrv. H 5 : : t :^ : ; :. :: ^ "i ;^e 
is the only one : f :he = t is : : : t t: : : a^ii 
hie we h3 e s:: t t : .t ? t ::: :s so 

wide in rin^t a:il s: virr::^ ::i :;:^::;- ::.:: :: ::T3.y be 
divided ":: ;: :1s. Ke ho o. 7: : re o ::s 

mnic A: :- :: : or '/. ':li ; t : 7 t ;_ :::n- 

mentaiyhe hnked on \-j :r_r rones 0: es sot h:: 00: 
of his life, and the 7 ? t : - : t : : : a. 

as Linton's. Hr 00 :oto a aoiTn::^ oo^tr, :o: 
seenas : a r n in his youth, a fixed p'a.:e a: the 



and at home wa: — ::z:. I: as: jaa t :trO 

::a::oo this time ina: t t t a: a a: :a : t: :f 

:^t irjahaVj. Theya::-T -:/.'. \z :.: L a a-:: i:;aa.aa:;:y 
with the life of mon ana ri:a:a They are ^rh:en :y 
one who knew the sea and tt^ :'\~ :s 

and storms of Northumbria. a: nnr oaa aai an an 
part in war, who kne^ :he forest-Ian a. the scottered 
villages and their da a ^ho love s 

and the birds, and V a^ ^ — : nar. 

wrote about nature o ^ eve 



22 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

and in a way we do not meet again in English poetry 
for many centuries. The poem on the Hurricane is 
an artistic whole, and may not be unjustly compared 
with Shelley's Ode to the West Wind. There is scarcely 
a trace of Christianity in these early poems. Trouble 
then fell on Cynewulf, and w4th it repentance for his 
'^ sinful Hfe/' and he tells in the Dream of the Rood 
of how comfort was brought to him at last. He then 
turned to write rehgious poems, and to this part of his 
life we may allot \ht Juliana, and perhaps the first part 
of the Gudlac. He then wrote, and with a far higher 
art, the Crista a long, almost an epical, poem of the 
' Incarnation, the Descent into Hell, the Ascension, and 
the Last Judgment, a noble and continuous effort, full 
of triumphant verse. He had now reached full peace 
of mind, and as much mastery over his art as was pos- 
sible at that early time. He may then have composed, 
from a poem now given to Lactantius, the allegorical 
poem of the Phxiiix^ in which there is a famous passage 
describing the sinless land ; the second part of the 
GuSlac^ as fine as the first is poor ; and still later on 
in hfe, and with a free recurrence to the war-poetry 
of heathendom, the Elene and the Andi^eas, the first, 
the finding of the True Cross by the Empress Helena, 
and remarkable for its battle-fervour ; the second equally 
remarkable for its imaginative treatment of the voyage 
of St. Andrew for the conversion of the Marmedonians. 
Then, before he died, and to leave his last message 
to his folk, he wrote, using perhaps part of an older 



I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 23 

poem, the Dream of the Holy Rood, and showed that 
even in his old age his imagination and his versing were 
as vivid as in his youth. 

17. Poetry during and after Alfred's Reign. — When 
^ilfred setup learning afresh in the south, it had perished 
in Xorthumbria. But no great poetr}- arose in the south. 
There was alliterative versing, but it had neither imagina- 
tion, originality, nor music. The English alhterative ver- 
sion of the Metra of Boethius may be .Elfred's own ; if 
so, he was plainly not a poet. The second part of the 
Genesis may belong to this time, but it is asserted now 
to be a translation. I do not beUeve that the last poems 
in the Ccedmonic ]\IS. are of this time, but of the Nor- 
thumbrian School. It was a time, however, of collections 
of the poetry of the past. Nearly all the Old English 
poetry, as we have it, is in the West-Saxon Dialect. 
Alfred had a Handbook, into which, tradition says, he 
copied some English songs. It is extremely likely that 
the poems in the Exeter Book were brought together in 
Alfred's time. In that book itself there are gnomic and 
didactic poems, as, for example, the Fates of Men and 
the Gifts of Men, which are collections of short verses 
belonging to various times, and some of them are very 
old. At a later period than ^Elfred's reign, these gnomic 
verses took the form of dialogues, partly in prose and 
partly in verse, and we have two incomplete specimens 
of this in the Solo7?ion and Saturnus, in which a Judaic 
legend is curiously mingled w^ith Teutonic forms of 
thought. To the same period may be allotted the 



^4 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Menologiu7n, a poetical calendar, the best portions of 
which seem borrowed from the past. The rest of the 
verse up to the Conquest is chiefly made up of allitera- 
tive sermons and the war songs. 

1 8. The War-poetry was probably always as plentiful 
as the religious, but was not likely to be written down 
by the monks. When, however, Alfred developed the 
Chronicle into a national history, the writers seized on 
popular songs, and inserted them in the Chronicle. In 
that way we have at least one fine war-poem handed 
down to us — The Song of Bnmanburh, 937. It de- 
scribes the fight of King ^thelstan with Anlaf the Dane 
and the Scots under Constantine. Another war-poem is 
the Fight at Maldon, the story of the death of Byrhtnoth, 
an East Saxon Ealdorman, in battle with a band of Vik- 
ings. They are the fitting source, in their simplicity and 
patriotism, of such war-songs as the Battle of the Baltic 
and the Siege of Lucknoiv, Of the two the Fight at 
Maldon is the finer, the most human and varied, but the 
Song of Brunanburh is lyrical as the latter is not. They 
are two different types of poetry. Both of them have 
some Norse feeling, and we may link with them from this 
point of view the Rhyme Song, which recalls the motive 
and spirit of the earlier Ruin, but which, having rhymes 
along with alliteration, resembles the Scandinavian form 
called Runhenda, and has induced critics to attribute it 
to the influence of the warrior and scald, Egil Skala- 
grimsson, who twice visited King ^thelstan. Two frag- 
mentary odes, among some other short poems, inserted 



I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 2^ 

in the Chronicle^ one on the deliverance of the five cities 
from the Danes by King Eadmund, 942 ; and another 
on the coronation of King Eadgar, are the last records 
of a war-poetry which naturally decayed when the Eng- 
lish were trodden down by the Normans. When Taille- 
fer rode into battle at Hastings, singing songs of Roland 
and Charlemagne, he sang more than the triumph of the 
Norman over the Enghsh ; he sang the victory for a time 
of French Romance over Old Enghsh poetry. 

19. Old English Prose. — It is pleasant to think that 
we may not unfairly make Enghsh prose begin with 
BiEDA. He was born about 673, and was hke Caedmon, 
a Northumbrian. After 6^2>^ ^^ spent his life at Jarrow, 
"in the same monastery," he says, "and while attentive 
to the rule of mine order, and the service of the Church, 
my constant pleasure lay in learning, or teaching, or 
writing." He enjoyed that pleasure for many years, for 
his quiet life was long, and his toil unceasing. Forty- 
five works prove his industry; and their fame over the 
whole of learned Europe proves their value. His learn- 
ing was as various as it was great. All that the world 
then knew of theology, science, music, rhetoric, medi- 
cine, arithmetic, astronomy, and physics was brought 
together by him ; his Ecclesiastical History is our best 
authority for Early England ; accuracy and delightful- 
ness are at one in it. It reveals his charming character ; 
and indeed, his hfe was as gentle, and himself as loved, 
as his work was great. His books were written in Latin, 
and with these we have nothing to do, but he strove to 



26 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAR 

make English prose a literary language, for his last work 
was a Translation of the Gospel of St. John, as almost 
his last words were in EngHsh verse. In the story of his 
death told by his disciple Cuthbert is the first record 
of Enghsh prose writing. When the last day came, the 
dying man called his scholars to him that he might 
dictate more of his translation. " There is still a chap- 
ter wanting," said the scribe, " and it is hard for thee 
to question thyself longer." '' It is easily done," said 
Baeda, " take thy pen and write swiftly." Through the 
day they wrote, and when evening fell, " There is yet one 
sentence unwritten, dear master," said the youth. '' Write 
it quickly," said the master. ^^ It is finished now." 
"Thou sayest true," was the reply, "all is finished now." 
He sang the " Glory to God " and died. It is to that 
scene that English prose looks back as its sacred source, 
as it is in the greatness and variety of Baeda's Latin work 
that English scholarship strikes its key-note. 

When Baeda died, Northumbria was the centre of 
European literature. Wilfrid of York had founded libra- 
ries and monasteries, but the true beginner of all the 
Northumbrian learning was Benedict Biscop, who col- 
lected two brother libraries at Wearmouth and Jarrow, 
and whose scholars were Ceolfrid and Baeda. Six hun- 
dred scholars gathered round Baeda, and he handed on 
all his learning to his pupil Ecgberht, who as Archbishop 
of York established the famous library, and founded the 
great school, or, as it may be called, the University of 
York. To this place, for more than sixty years, all 



I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 2/ 

Europe sent pupils to win the honey of learning. Al- 
cuin, Ecgberht's pupil, finally took with him to the court 
of Charles the Great, in 792, all the knowledge which 
Baeda had won and the School of York had expanded. 
Through Alcuin then, whom we may call Charles's ]\Iin- 
ister of Education, England was the source of the new 
education which slowly spread over the vast sphere of 
the Erankish Empire. This was done just at the right 
moment, for Alcuin had scarce left the English shores 
for the last time when the Danes descended on Xor- 
thumbria, and blotted out the whole of its hterature and 
learning. 

20. Alfred. — Though the long battle with the in- 
vaders was lost in the north, it was gained for a time by 
^Elfred the Great in Wessex ; and with ^Elfred's literary 
work, learning changed its seat from the north to the 
south. ^/Elfred's writings and translations, being in Eng- 
hsh and not in Latin, make him, since B^da's work is 
lost, the true father of English prose. As Whitby is the 
cradle of English poetry, so is Winchester of English 
prose. At Winchester the king took the English tongue 
and made it the tongue in which history, philosophy, 
law, and rehgion spoke to the Enghsh people. No work 
was ever done more eagerly or more practically. He 
brought scholars from different parts of the world. He 
set up schools in his monasteries ^" where every free-born 
youth, who has the means, shall attend to his book till 
he can read English crating perfectly." He presided 
over a school in his own court. He made himself a 



28 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

master of a literary English style, and he did this that 
he might teach his people. He translated the popular 
manuals of the time into EngHsh, but he edited them 
with large additions of his own, needful as he thought, 
for English use. He gave his nation moral philosophy 
in Boethius's Coiisolation of Philosophy ; a universal his- 
tory, with geographical chapters of his own, '' of the 
highest hterary and philological value as specimens of his 
natural prose," in his translation of Orosius ; an ecclesi- 
astical history of England in Baeda's History, giving to 
some details a West-Saxon form ; and a religious hand- 
book, with a preface of his own, in the Pastoral Rule of 
Pope Gregory. He induced Bishop Werferth to translate 
into English the Dialogues of Gregory, a book which had 
a far-reaching influence on mediceval literature and the- 
ology. We do not quite know whether he worked him- 
self at the English or Anglo-Saxo?t Chronicle, but at 
least it was in his reign that this chronicle rose out of 
meagre lists into a full narrative of events. To him, 
then, we EngUsh look back as the fountain of English 
prose literature. 

21. The Later Old English Prose. — The impulse he 
gave soon died away, but it was revived under King Ead- 
gar the Peaceful, whose seventeen years of government 
(958-75) were the most prosperous and glorious of the 
West-Saxon Empire. Under him and his predecessors, 
^thelwold, Bishop of Winchester, founded and kept up 
English schools, and, working together with Archbishop 
Dunstan and Oswald of Worcester, recreated monastic 



I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 29 

life, classic learning, and the education of the clergy. 
Their labours were the origin of the famous Blickling 
Homilies^ 971. About twenty years after, ^-Elfric, called 
'^ Grammaticus " from his Englished Latin Grammar, 
began to write. He turned into Enghsh the Pentateuch, 
Joshua, and part of Job. The rest of his numerous 
works are some of the best models we possess of the 
literary Enghsh of the beginning of the eleventh century. 
The two collections of Homilies we owe to him, and 
his Lives of. the Saints, are written in a classic prose, 
and his Glossary end Colloquy, afterwards edited by 
^Ifric Bata, served for a kind of Enghsh- Latin text- 
book. His prose in his later hfe was somewhat spoiled 
by his over- mastering fancy for alliteration, but he is 
always a clear and forcible writer of English. But this 
revival had no sooner begun to take root than the North- 
men came again in force upon the land and conquered it. 
We have in Wulfstan's (Archbishop of York, 1002-23) 
Address to the English, a terrible picture, written in im- 
passioned prose, of the demoralisation caused by the in- 
roads of the Danes. During the fresh interweaving of 
Danes and English together under Danish kings from 
1013 to 1042, no Enghsh literature arose, but Latin prose 
intruded more and more on Enghsh writing. It was 
towards the reign of Edward the Confessor that English 
writing again began to hve. But no sooner was it born 
than the Norman invasion repressed, but did not quench 
its life. 

22. The English Chronicle. — One great monument, 



30 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

however, of Old English prose lasts beyond the Conquest. 
It is the English Chro7iicle, and in it our literature is 
continuous from y^lfred to Stephen. At first it was 
nothing but a record of the births and deaths of bishops 
and kings, and was probably a West-Saxon Chronicle. 
Among these short notices there is, however, one tragic 
story, of Cynewulf and Cyneheard, under the date 755 
— but the true date is 784 — so rude in style, and so cir- 
cumstantial, that it is probably contemporary with the 
events themselves. If so, it is the oldest piece of histori- 
cal prose in any Teutonic tongue. More than a hundred 
years later Alfred took up the Chronicle, caused it to 
be edited from various sources, added largely to it from 
Baeda, and raised it to the dignity of a national his- 
tory. The narrative of Alfred's wars with the Danes, 
written, it is likely, by himself at the end of his reign, 
enables us to estimate the great weight Alfred himself 
had in literature. ^^ Compared with this passage," says 
Professor Earle, '' every other piece of prose, not in these 
Chronicles merely, but throughout the whole range of ex- 
tant Saxon literature, must assume a secondary rank." 
After Alfred's reign, and that of his son Eadward, 901-25, 
the Chronicle becomes scanty, but songs and odes are in- 
serted in it. In the reign of ^thelred and during the 
Danish kings its fulness returns, and growing by additions 
from various quarters, it continues to be our great contem- 
porary authority in English history till 11 5 4, when it 
abruptly closes with the death of Stephen. ^' It is the first 
history of any Teutonic people in their own language ; it 



I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 3 1 

is the earliest and most venerable monument of English 
prose." In it Old Enghsh poetry sang its last extant 
song^ in its death Old English prose dies. It is not till 
the reign of John that English poetry, in any form but 
that of short poems, appears again in the Brut of Laya- 
mon. It is not till the reign of Henry III. that original 
English prose begins again in the Ancren Riwie (the 
Rule of Anchoresses), in the Wooing of our Lord, and in 
the charming homily entitled the Sawles Warde, 



32 ENGLISH LITERATURE 



CHAPTER II 

FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, I066-I4OO 

23. General Outline. — The invasion of Britain by the 
EngUsh made the island, its speech, and its Hterature, 
EngUsh. The invasion of England by the Danes left onr 
speech and literature still EngUsh. The Danes were of 
our stock and tongue, and we absorbed them. The in- 
vasion of England by the Normans seemed likely to crush 
the English people, to root out their literature, and even 
to threaten their speech. But that which happened to 
the Danes happened to the Normans also, and for the 
same reason. They were originally of like blood to the 
Enghsh, and of like speech ; and though during their 
settlement in Normandy they had become French in 
manner and language, and their Hterature French, yet 
the old blood prevailed in the end. The Norman felt 
his kindred with the Enghsh tongue and spirit, became 
an Englishman, and left the French tongue that he might 
speak and write in English. We absorbed the Normans, 
and we took into our literature and speech the French 
elements they had brought with them. It was a process 
slower in literature than it was in the political history, 



11 FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 33 

but it began from the political struggle. Up to the time 
of Henry II. the Norman troubled himself but little about 
the English tongue. But when French foreigners came 
pouring into the land in the train of Henry and his sons 
the Norman allied himself with the Englishman against 
these foreigners, and the English tongue began to rise into 
importance. Its Hterature grew slowly, but as quickly 
as most of the literatures of Europe. Moreover it never 
quite ceased. We are carried on to the year 1154 by the 
prose of the Enghsh Chronicle. There are traces in the 
Norman Chroniclers of the use they made of lost Eng- 
lish war-songs. There are Old English homihes which 
we may date from 11 20. The so-called Moral Ode, an 
English rhyming poem, was compiled about the year 1 170. 
It made almost a school ; it gave rise to some impassioned 
poems to the Virgin, and it is found in a volume of hom- 
ilies of the same date. In the reign of Henr}^ IL, the 
old Southern-English Gospels of King ./Ethelred's time 
were modernised after 200 years or less of use. The 
Sayings of Alfred, written in English for the English, 
were composed about the year 1200. xAbout the same 
date the Old English Charters of Bury St. Edmunds were 
translated into the dialect of the shire, and now, early in 
the thirteenth century, at the central time of the strife 
between English and foreign elements, after the death of 
Richard I.^ the Brut of Layamon and the Orr??iulu7?i 
come forth within ten years of each other to prove the 
continuity, the survival, and the victory of the English 
tongue. When the patriotic struggle closed in the reign 



34 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

of Edward I., English literature had again risen, through 
the song, the religious poems, the alliterative romance 
and homily, the lives of saints and the translations of 
French romances, into importance, and was written by a 
people made up of Norman and Englishman welded into 
one by the fight against the French foreigner. But 
though the foreigner was driven out, his literature influ- 
enced, and continued to influence, the new English 
poetry, for in this revival our literature was chiefly poet- 
ical. Prose, with but few exceptions, was still written 
in Latin. 

24. Religious and Story-telling Poetry are the two 
main streams into which this poetical literature divides 
itself. The religious poetry is for the most part English 
in spirit, and a poetry of the people, from the Orrmu- 
lum, about 12 15, to Fie7's Plowman^ in which poem the 
distinctly EngKsh poetry reached its truest expression in 
1362. The story-telling poetry may be called English at 
its beginning in the Brut of Layamon, but becomes more 
and more influenced by the romantic poetry of France, 
and in the end grows in Chaucer's hands into a poetry 
of the court and of fine allegory, a literary in contrast 
with a popular poetry. But Chaucer, at first thus influ- 
enced by French and then by ItaHan subjects, becomes 
at last entirely English in feehng and in subjects, and the 
Ca?iferbury Tales are the best example of English story- 
telling we possess. The struggle then of England against 
the foreigner to become and remain England finds its 
parallel in the struggle of English poetry against the 



11 FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 35 

influence of foreign poetry to become and remain English. 
Both struggles were long and varied, but in both Eng- 
land was triumphant. She became a nation, and she won 
a national Hterature. It is the course of this struggle 
we have now to trace along the two lines already laid 
down — the poetry of rehgion and the poetry of story- 
telling ; but to do so we must begin in both instances 
with the Xorman Conquest. 

25. The Religious Poetry, — The religious revival of 
the eleventh century was strongly felt in Normandy, and 
both the knights and Churchmen who came to England 
with William the Conqueror and during his son's reign, 
were founders of abbeys, from which, as centres of learn- 
ing and charity, the country was civilised. Where Lan- 
franc and Anselm lived, religion or scholastic learning 
was not likely to go to sleep. A frequent communica- 
tion was kept up with French scholarship through the 
University of Paris. Schools and libraries multiplied. 
The Latin learning of England steadily developed. Its 
scholars in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries wrote 
not only on theology, but on many various subjects ; 
and soiTie of their books influenced the whole of Euro- 
pean thought. In Henry I.'s reign the religion of 
England was further quickened by missionary monks 
sent by Bernard of Clairvaux. London was stirred to 
rebuild St. Paul's, and abbeys rose in all the well- 
watered valleys of the north. Thus the Enghsh citi- 
zens of London and the Enghsh peasants in the country 
received a new rehdous hfe from the foreisrn noble and 



36 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

the foreign monk, and both were drawn together through 
a common worship. When this took place a desire arose 
for religious handbooks in the English tongue. Orrmin's 
Orrmulum may be taken as a type of these. We mxay 
date it, though not precisely, at 12 15, the date of the 
Great Charter. It is English ; its sources are ^Ifric 
and Baeda ; its Danish writer loves his native dialect ; 
not five French words are to be found in it. It is a 
metrical version of the Gospel of each day with the 
addition of a sermon in verse. '^ This book is named 
OrrmiUiun for that Orrm it wrought." It marks the 
rise of Enghsh religious literature, and its religion is 
simple and rustic. Orrm's ideal monk is " a very pure 
man, and altogether without property, except that he 
shall be found in simple meat and clothes." He will 
have '^ a hard and stiff and rough and heavy life to 
lead. All his heart and desire ought to be aye toward 
heaven, and to serve his Master well." This was Eng- 
lish religion in the country at this date. It was con- 
tinued in Enghsh prose writing by the Ancren Riwle — 
the Rule of the Anchoresses — written about 1220. The 
original MS. was probably in the Dorsetshire dialect. 
The Genesis and then the Exodus, biblical poems of 
about 1250, were made by the pious writers to make 
Christian men as glad as birds at the dawning for the 
story of salvation. A Northumbrian Psalter of 1250 
is only one example out of many devotional pieces, 
homilies, metrical creeds, hymns to the Virgin (mostly 
imitated from the French), which, with the metrical 



II FROM THE COXQUEST TO CHAUCER 37 

Lives of the Saints (a large volume, the lives translated 
from Latin or French prose into English verse), carry 
the rehgious poetry up to 1300. Among these the 
most important are the lives of three saints, Marherete, 
Juliane, and Kateri?ie, and the homily on Hali Meideii- 
had (Holy ^Maidenhood) all in alhterative verse, written 
in southern England, and beginning a new and vital 
class of poetry, the poetry of impassioned love to 
Christ and the Virgin. 

26. Literature and the Friars. — There was little 
religion in the towns, but this was soon changed. In 
1 22 1 the Mendicant Friars came to England, and they 
chose the towns for their work. The first Friars who 
learnt English that they might preach to the people 
were foreigners, and spoke French. ]\Iany English 
Friars studied in Paris, and came back to England, 
able to talk to Norman noble and Enghsh peasant. 
Their influence, exercised both on Xorman and Eng- 
hsh, was thus a mediatory and uniting one, and Normans 
as well as English now began to write religious works in 
Enghsh. The people, of course, had to be served with 
stories, and in the early years of the fourteenth century 
a number of Christian legends of the childhood of Jesus, 
of the Virgin, the x\postles and Saints, and of miracles, 
chiefly drawn from the French, were put into varying 
poetic forms ; and, recited everywhere, added a large 
number of materials to the imagination of England. A 
legend-cycle was thus formed, and this cycle was chiefly 
made by writers in the south of Englajid, In 1303 



38 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Robert jMannyng of Brunne, in Lincolnshire, freely 
translated, to please plain people, a French work, the 
iManual of Sins (written thirty years earlier by William 
of Waddington), under the title of Hajidlyng Syniie, 
WiUiam of Shoreham translated the whole of the Psalter 
into English prose about 1327, and wrote poems which 
might be called treatises in rhyme. The Cursor Mimdi, 
.written about 1320, in Northumbria, and thought ^^ the 
best book of all " by men of that time, was a metrical 
recast of the history of the Old and New Testament, 
interspersed, as was the Hajidlyng Syniie, with legends 
of saints. This book started a whole series of verse- 
homilies tagged with tales, which created in northern 
England a legend-cycle similar to that created in the 
south. Some scattered Sermons, and in 1340 the 
Ayenhite of Inwyt (the Sting of Conscience), translated 
from the French, mark how English prose w^as rising 
through religion. About the same year Richard Rolle, 
the Hermit of Hampole, VvTOte in Latin and in Nor- 
thumbrian English for the '^unlearned," a poem called 
the Pricke of Conscience. This poem is the last dis- 
tinctly religious poem of any importance before the 
Visio?i of Piers Ploiunian, unless we are led to except 
those written by the author of The Grene Knight, At 
its date, 1340, the religious influence of the Friars was 
swiftly decaying. Li Piers Plowman their influence for 
good is gone. In that poem, which brings rehgious 
poetry, in the death of its author, up to 1400, the re- 
ligious literature of England strikes the last note of 



II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 39 

the old religious impulse and the boldest music of the 
new. The Friar is slain, the Puritan survives. 

27. History and the Story-telling Poetry. — The 
Normans brought an historical taste with them to 
England, and created a valuable historical literature. 
It was written in Latin, and we have nothing to do 
with it till EngUsh story-telling grew out of it about 
the time of the Great Charter. But it was in itself 
of such importance that a few things must be said 
concerning it. 

(i) The men who wrote it were called Chroxiclers. 
At first they were only annaHsts — that is, they jotted 
down the events of year after year without any attempt 
to bind them together into a connected whole. Of these, 
the most important, and indeed they were something 
more than mere annalists, were Ordericus Vitalis, and 
his predecessors, Florence of Worcester and Simeon of 
Durham. But afterwards, from the time of Henry L, 
another class of men arose, who wrote, not in scattered 
monasteries, but at the Court. Living at the centre of 
political life, their histories were written in a philosophic 
spirit, and wove into a whole the growth of law and 
national hfe and the story of affairs abroad. They are 
our great authorities for the history of these times. They 
begin with William of }vlalmesbury, whose book ends in 
1142, and die out after ]\Iatthew Paris, 1235-73. His- 
torical prose in England is only represented after the 
death of Henry IH. by a few dry Latin annalists till it 
rose again in modern English prose in 15 13, when Sir 



40 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Thomas More's Life of Edward V. and Usurpation of 
Richard III. is said to have been written. 

(2) A distinct English feeling soon sprang up among 
these Norman historians. Enghsh patriotism was far 
from having died among the Enghsh themselves. The 
Sayings of /Elfj'ed were written in Enghsh by the Enghsh. 
These and some ballads, as well as the early English 
war-songs, interested the Norman historians and were 
collected by them. William of Malmesbury, who was 
born of English and Norman parents, has sympathies 
with both peoples, and his history marks how both were 
becoming one nation. The same welding together of 
the conquered and the conquerors is seen in Henry of 
Huntingdon and others, till we come to Matthew Paris, 
whose view of history is entirely that of an Englishman. 
When he wrote, Norman noble and English yeoman, 
Norman abbot and English priest, were, and are in his 
pages, one in blood and one in interests. 

28. English Story-telling grew out of this historical 
hterature. There was a Welsh priest at the court of 
Henry L, called Geoffrey of Monmouth, who, inspired 
by the Genius of romance, composed in Latin twelve 
short books (1132-35), which he playfully called History. 
He had been given, he said, an ancient Welsh book to 
translate which told in verse the history of Britain from 
the days when Brut, the great-grandson of ^neas, landed 
on its shores, through the whole history of King Arthur 
down to Cadwallo, a Welsh king who died in 689. The 
real historians were angry at the fiction, and declared 



II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 4I 

that throughout the whole of it '' he had lied saucily and 
shamelessly." It was indeed only a clever putting to- 
gether and invention of a number of Welsh and other 
legends, but it was the beginning of story-telling after the 
Conquest. Every one who read it was dehghted with it ; 
it made, as we should say, a sensation, and as much on 
the Continent as in England. Geoffrey may be said to 
have created the heroic figure of Arthur, which had been 
only sketched in the compilation which passes under the 
name of Nennius. In it the Welsh invaded English liter- 
ature, and their tales have never since ceased to live in 
it. They charm us as much in Tennyson's Idylls of the 
King 2.^ they charmed us in the days of Henry I. But the 
stories Geoffrey of Monmouth told were in Latin prose. 
They were put first into French verse by Geoffrey Gaimar 
for the wife of his patron, Ralph FitzGilbert, a northern 
baron. They got afterwards to France and, added to 
from Breton legends, were made into a poem and decked 
out with the ornaments of French romance. In that 
form they came back to England as the work of Wace, a 
Norman of Caen, the writer also of the Roman de Rou, 
who called his poem the Geste des Bretons (afterwards 
the Brut) J and completed it in 1155, shortly after the 
accession of Henry 11. Spread far and wide in France, 
it led to an immense development there and elsewhere 
of the Legend of Arthur and his Knights. 

29. Layamon*s '*Brut.*' — In this French form the 
story drifted through England, and at last faUing into the 
hands of an English priest in Worcestershire, he resolved 



42 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAR 

to tell it in alliterative English verse to his countrymen, 
and so doing became the writer of our first important 
English poem after the Conquest. We may roughly say 
that its date is 1205, ten years or so before the Orr7mi- 
lunt was written, ten years before the Great Charter. It 
is plain that its composition, though it told a Welsh story, 
was looked on as a patriotic work by the writer. ^^ There 
was a priest in the land," he writes of himself, ^Svhose 
name was Layamon ; he was son of Leovenath : May 
the Lord be gracious unto him ! He dwelt at Earnley, 
a noble church on the bank of Severn, near Radstone, 
where he read books. It came in mind to him and in 
his chiefest thought that he would tell the noble needs 
of England, what the men were named, and whence they 
came, who first had English land." And it was truly of 
great importance. The poem opened to the imagination 
of the Enghsh people an immense, though a fabled, past 
for the history of the island they dwelt in, and made a 
common bond of interest between Norman and EngHsh- 
man. It linked also the Welsh to the English and the 
Norman. Written on the borders of Wales, it introduces 
a number of Briton legends of which Wace knew nothing, 
and of English stories also down to the days of ^thel- 
stan. It enlarged Arthur before the eyes of men, and 
even Teutonic sagas enter into the story. In the realm 
of poetry all nations meet and are reconciled. Though 
a great deal of it is rendered from the French, there are 
not fifty French words in its 30,000 lines. The old Eng- 
lish alliterative metre is kept up with a few rare rhymes. 



II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 43 

III battle, in pathetic story, in romantic adventure, in in- 
vention, in the sympathy of sea and storm with heroic 
deeds, he is a greater and more original poet than those 
who followed him, till we come to Chaucer. He touches 
with one hand the ancient England before the Conquest, 
he touches with another the romantic poetry after it. In- 
deed, what Csedmon was to early English poetry, Layamon 
is to EngHsh poetry after the Conquest. He is the first 
of the new singers. 

30. Story-telling becomes entirely French in Form. — 
After an interval the desire for story-telling increased in 
England, and France satisfied the desire. The French 
tales were carried over our land by the travelling mer- 
chant and friar, by the gleemen and singers who trans- 
lated them, or sung translations of them, not only to the 
castle and the farm, but to the village and the town. 
Floiiz and Blanchefiicr and the Rovia7ice of Sir T7Hstrem 
were versified before 1300, and many other romantic 
tales. The lay of Havelok the Dane was perhaps adapted 
from the French towards the close of the thirteenth cen- 
tury, and so was the song of King Horn, Their English 
origin is also maintained, and at least both rest on Teutonic 
tradition. The first took form in northern England, and 
shares in the rough vigour of the north. The second is a 
southern tale, and has been entirely transformed by the 
romantic spirit. Enghsh in rhythm, it is thoroughly 
French in feeling. The romances of Kiiig Alexander and 
of Richard Coeiir de Lion, and of Arthour and Mei'lin, 
while romantic in form, preserve an English sentiment 



44 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

and originality which make us remember that, when they 
were written, Edward I. was making Norman and Enghsh 
into one people. About 1300 the story- telHng verged 
into historical poems, and Robert of Gloucester wrote 
his Rhyming Chro7ticle,ixo\Ti Brutus to Edward I. As the 
dates grow nearer to 1300, the amount of French words 
increases, and the French romantic manner of story-telling. 
In the Romance of Alexander, to take one example as a 
type of all, the natural landscape, the conventional intro- 
ductions to the parts, the gorgeous descriptions of pomps, 
and armour, and cities, the magic wonders, the manners, 
and feasts, and battles of chivalry, especially the love 
affairs and feehngs, are all steeped in the colours of 
French romantic poetry. Now this romance was origi- 
nally adapted by a Frenchman about the year 1200. It 
took therefore nearly a century before the French 
romantic manner of poetry could be naturahsed in 
Enghsh ; and it was naturalised, curious to say, at the 
very time when England as a nation had lost its French 
attachments and become entirely English. 

31. Cycles of Romance. — At this time, then, the 
French romance of a hundred years earlier was made 
English in England. There were four great romantic 
stories. The first was that of Kmg A7^lhur, and Geoffrey 
of Monmouth began it in England about 1132, Before 
II 50 it was taken up in Normandy, sent therefrom into 
France, and independent invention soon began to play 
upon it. Of these inventors the first was Crestien of 
Troyes, but we owe to Robert de Boron, a knight of the 



11 FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 45 

Vosges country, the first poem on the Graal, the Holy 
Dish with which Christ celebrated the Last Supper, and 
which in the hands of Joseph of Arimathea received 
his blood. The origin of the legend may be traced to 
Celtic stories, and this may partly account for its 
swift development in the west of England. Two more 
romances on the subject, Le Grand St. Graal and La 
Quesie del St, Graai, in which Galahad appears, are 
attributed to Walter Map, a friend of Henry II., and 
they were certainly written in England in that king's 
reign. It is due to the Anglo-Normans and the Normans 
that this Graal-story, in which the Arthur legends were 
bound up with the highest doctrine of the Church, took 
its great development, not only in France but in Ger- 
many. /\longside of the Arthurian Saga arose the 
Tristan story, and, at first independent, it was afterwards 
linked on to the tale of Arthur. These two together, 
along with stories invented concerning all the Knights of 
the Round Table, and chiefly Launcelot and Gawaine, 
were worked over in a multitude of romantic tales, most 
of which became popular in England, and were sung and 
made into English verse from the thirteenth to the 
sixteenth century. 

The second romantic story was that of Chai'lemagyie 
and his twelve peers. Begun in France with the Song of 
Roland^ a huge tale of Charlemagne was forged about 
mo in the name of x\rchbishop Turpin. In this, 
Charlemagne's wars were bound up with oriental legend, 
with the Holy Sepulchre, with every kind of story. A 



46 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

great number of Carlovingian romances followed. This 
cycle, however, owing perhaps to the aUenation of the 
Anglo-Normans in England from the French, was not 
much developed in England at the beginning of our 
romance-writing. The most popular of the Carlovingian 
poems was the poem of Otinel in the reign of Edward 
II. ; but the most beautiful was Amis et Amiloim^ the 
Enghsh version of which so wholly leaves out its con- 
nexion with Charlemagne that it has been supposed to be 
an original Anglo-Norman-EngHsh poem. The Rola7id, 
the Charlemagne and Roland^ a Siege of Milan, Sir 
Feriinib7'as and the humorous Rauf Coilyear almost 
exhaust the English poems of this cycle. 

The third Romantic story is that of the Life of 
Alexander, derived from a Latin version (fourth century) 
of the Greek story made in Alexandria under the name 
of Callisthenes. Its romantic wonders, fictions, and 
magic, largely added to from the Arabian books about 
Eskander, were doubled by the imagination and coloured 
with all the romance of chivalry in the eleventh or twelfth 
century ; and the story became so common in England 
that '^ every wight that hath discrecioune," says Chaucer, 
had heard of ^Alexander's fortune. No doubt it was sung 
all over England, but we have only a few poems concern- 
ing it in English, the last of which, a free translation of 
a French original. The Bulk of the most noble and vail- 
zeand Conquerour, belongs to the fourth decade of the 
fifteenth century. 

The fourth romantic story, first in date, but last in im- 



II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 4/ 

portance in England, was that of the Siege of Troy. Two 
Latin pieces, bearing the names of Diires PJirygius and 
of Dictys Cretensis, composed about the story of Troy 
in the dechne of Latin literature, were worked over by 
Benoit de Sainte More, with fabulous and romantic in- 
ventions of his own, in the Rojian de Troie, about 1160. 
Guido della Colonne, of Messina, took them up about 
1270, and with additions woven into them from the 
Theban and x\rgonautic stories, made a great Latin story 
out of them which Lydgate used. Virgil supplied mate- 
rials for a romance of y^neas ; Statins for a Ro7na7i de 
Thebes. During the crusades Byzantine and oriental 
stories entered into French romance, and especially into 
this Cycle of Troy. The Gest Historiale (XIV. Cent.) 
of the Destruction of Troy, first introduced the story of 
Troilus (invented by Benoit) to readers of Enghsh verse. 
This cycle does not seem to have much entered into our 
literature till Chaucer's time, but it attracted both Chau- 
cer and Lydgate. 

These were the four great Romantic cycles which were 
used by English poets. But the desire for romances 
was not satisfied with these. A few collected round Old 
English traditions or history. There was a poem about 
Wade, the father of Weland, to which Chaucer alludes. 
It has long been lost, but a small fragment of it has lately 
been discovered. I have already mentioned the stories 
of Horn and Havelok. The romances of Guy of War- 
wick and of Bevis of Hampton^ though both translated 
from the French, take us back to the time of .Ethelstan 



48 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

and Eadgar, but are as unhistorical as the tales of Troy 
and Alexander. A number of other romances from vari- 
ous sources belong to the time of the Edwards, and were 
all derived from the French. Short tales also sprang up, 
taken from the fabliaux^ from the Roinan de Renart, 
from the French lais, some satirical, some of love, some 
in the form of ^^ debates." Compilations of tales were 
made. The Sevym Sages was worked from the oriental 
stock of the Book of the Seven Wise Men; and the Gesta 
Roma7iorum^ a book of stories which began to be used 
in England in the reign of Edw^ard I., supplied the mate- 
rial for tales in England as well as all over Europe. The 
country was therefore swarming with tales, chiefly French, 
and its poetic imagination with the fancies, the fables, 
the love, and the ornaments of French romance, trans- 
lated and imitated in English, and written in the metres 
of France and in rhyme. 

32. Alliterative English Poems, 1350. — In the midst 
of all this French imitation, something national begins 
to gleam, and it comes from the west, from the lands on 
the edge of Wales and Cumbria. This is the recovery 
of the Old English metre, that fine, elastic, marching, 
epic, alliterative metre which Layamon used, and which 
takes us back to Cynewulf. The things written now in 
this national metre are still romantic and French in sub- 
ject, feeling, and manners ; but their Teutonic metre 
shdes a fresh, even a vigorous originality, into the con- 
ventional phrasing of the romantic poetry. This reaction 
from a French to an English type began in the middle 



II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 49 

of the fourteenth century, and runs parallel with the gen- 
eral victory of the English language over the French in 
the time of Edward III. At least twelve important 
poems are written in this alHterative metre, the last of 
which in this century was Langland's Vision. Am.ong 
these, but not altogether alliterative, are the poems of a 
northern, perhaps a Lancashire poet. These are Si7' 
Gawayne and the Grene Knight ; Pearl ; and Chari- 
ness and Patience (Clannesse and Pacience). This poet, 
who probably had finished his poems just as Chaucer and 
Langland began to write, stands quite apart from his fel- 
lows in excellence, and, indeed, along with Langland and 
only below Chaucer. Though Sir Gaiuayne is romantic, 
it escapes at many points from the French spirit. It is 
more original, it is more imaginative, it is far more in- 
tense in feeling, than the ordinary romances. It de- 
scribes natural scenery at first hand, and the scenery is 
that of the poet's own country. It is moral in aim, it is 
composed into an organic whole. It is full of new inven- 
tions. In the Pearl, our earliest In Menwiiani, there is 
an extraordinary personal passion of grief and of reHgious 
exultation pervading a lovely symbolism, which is quite 
unique. The same strong personality, mixed with a 
more distinctly moral purpose, fills the writer's two other 
poems, and brings him as a rehgious poet into range 
with Langland on the one hand, and with Cynewulf 
on the other. No one can crudely mix him up with 
France. He is as Enghsh, at the last, as Langland or 
Chaucer. 



50 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

33. English Lyrics. — In the midst of all this story- 
telling, like prophecies of what should afterwards be so 
lovely in our poetry, rose, no one can tell how, some 
lyric poems, country idylls, love songs, and, later on, 
some war-songs. The English ballad, sung from town 
to town by wandering gleemen, had never altogether 
died. A number of rude ballads collected round the 
legendary Robin Hood, and the kind of poetic litera- 
ture which sang of the outlaw and the forest, and after- 
wards so fully of the wild border hfe, gradually took 
form. About 1280 a beautiful little idyll called the 
Ozvl and the Nightingale was written, probably in Dor- 
setshire, in which the rival birds submit their quarrel for 
precedence to the possible writer of the poem, Nicholas 
of Guildford. About 1300 we meet with a few lyric 
poems, full of charm. They sing of spring-time with its 
blossoms, of the woods ringing with the thrush and night- 
ingale, of the flowers and the seemly sun, of country 
work, of the woes and joys of love, and many other 
delightful things. They are tinged with the colour of 
French romance, but they have an English background. 
This lyrical movement began with hymns to the Virgin 
and Christ, touched with the sentiments of Latin and 
Norman-French amorous poetry. These changed into 
frank love-poems in the hands of the wandering stu- 
dents. Many arose on the Welsh marches, and were 
tinged with Celtic feeling. Some are no doubt literary 
renderings of Enghsh folk-songs, such as ^' Sumer is 
ycumen in," ^^ Blow, northerne wind," and are full of 



II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 5 I 

love of women and love of nature. After these, a new 
type of religious lyrics blossomed, in which, as in all 
future English poetry, the love of nature was mingled 
with the love of God and the longing of the soul for 
perfect beauty. Satirical lyrics also arose, and the pro- 
verbial poetry of France gave an impulse to collections 
hke the Proverbs of He?idyng. Most of these were oi 
the time of Henry III. and Edward I. Political ballads 
now began, in Edward I.'s reign, to be frequently written 
in Enghsh, but the only dateable ballads of importance 
are that on the battle of Lewes, 1264, and the ten war 
lyrics of Laurence j\Iinot, who, in 1352, sang the great 
deeds and battles of Edward IIL 

34. The King's English. — After the Conquest, French 
or Latin w^as the language of the literary class. The Eng- 
lish tongue, spoken only by the people, fell back from the 
standard West-Saxon English of the Clwoiiicle into that 
broken state of anarchy in which each part of the country 
has its own dialect, and each writer uses the dialect of 
his own dwelling-place. All the poems then of which we 
have spoken were written in dialects of English, not in a 
fixed English common to all writers. During the prev- 
alence of French, and the continued translation of 
French poems, EngHsh had been invaded by French 
words, and though it had become, in Edward IIL's 
reign, the national tongue, it had been transformed as a 
language. The old inflections had mostly disappeared. 
French endings and prefixes were used, till even so early 
as the end of Edward I.'s reign, in Robert of Brunne's 



52 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

work, a tliird of his nouns, adverbs, and verbs, are 
French. His work was still however in a dialect — the 
East-Midland dialect. This dialect grew into the lan- 
guage of literature, the standard E7iglish, In Robert of 
Brunne, it was most literary and most French, but we 
must remember that the same dialect belonged to the 
two centres of learning, Oxford and Cambridge, and that 
London, on this side the Thames was contained in the 
same Anglian boundaries. This conquering dialect, when 
it became the standard Enghsh, did not prevent the 
Vision concerning Piers Plowman and Wyclif s transla- 
tion of the Bible from being written in a dialect, but it 
became the English in which all future English Hterature 
was to be written. It was fixed into clear form by 
Chaucer. It was the language talked at the court and 
in the court society to which that poet belonged. It was 
the King's English, and the fact that it was the tongue 
of the best and most cultivated society, as well as the 
great excellence of the works written in it by Chaucer, 
made it at once the tongue of literature. 

35. Religious Literature in Langland and Wyclif. — 
We have traced the work of '^ transition Enghsh," as it 
has been called, along the lines of popular religion and 
story-telling. The first of these, in the realm of poetry, 
reaches its goal in the work of William Langland ; in the 
realm of prose it reaches its goal in Wyclif. In both 
these writers, the work differs from any that went before 
it, by its popular power, and by the depth of its re- 
ligious feeling. It is plain that it represented a society 



II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 53 

much more strongly moved by religion tlian that of 
the beginning of the fourteenth century. In WycHf, the 
voice comes from the university and it went all over the 
land in the body of preachers whom, like Wesley, he sent 
forth. In Langland's Visio7i we have a voice from the 
centre of the people themselves ; his poem is written 
in old alliterative Enghsh verse, and in the Old Enghsh 
manner. The very ploughboy could understand it. It 
became the book of those who desired social and Church 
reform. It was as eagerly listened to by the free labourers 
and fugitive serfs who collected round John Ball and Wat 
Tyler. It embodied a puritan reaction against the Friars 
who had fallen away from the religious revival they had 
so nobly instituted. The strongest cry of this regenerated 
religion was for truth as against hypocrisy, for purity in 
State and Church and private life, for honest labour, and 
against ill-gotten wealth and its tyrannical persecution. 
There was also a great movement at this time against the 
class system of the Middle Ages. This was made a re- 
ligious movement vv^hen the equality of all men before 
God was maintained, and a social movement when it pro- 
tested against the oppression of the poor and on behalf 
of their misery. The French wars had increased this 
misery. Heavy taxation and severe laws ground down the 
peasantry. The ^^ Black Death" deepened the wretched- 
ness into panic. In 1349, 1362, and 1369 it swept over 
England. Grass grew in the towns ; whole villages w^re 
left uninhabited ; a wild terror fell upon the people, 
which was added to by a fierce tempest in 1362 that to 



54 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

men's minds told of the wrath of God. In their panic 
then, as well as in their pain, they fled to religion. 

^6. Piers Plowman. — All these elements are to be 
found fully represented in the Vision of Willia^n concern- 
ing Piers Plowman^ followed by that concerning Dowel, 
Dobet, a?id Dobest. Its author, William Langland, 
though we are not certain of his surname, was born, about 
1332, at Cleobury IMortimer, in Shropshire. His Vision 
begins with a description of his sleeping on the Malvern 
Hills, and the first text of it was probably written in the 
country in 1362. At the accession of Richard II., 1377, 
he was in London. The great popularity of his poem 
made him in that year, and again about the year 1398, 
send forth two more texts of his poem. In these texts 
he made so many additions to the first text that he nearly 
doubled the length of the original poem. In 1399, he 
wrote his last poem, Richard the Redeless , and then died, 
probably in 1400, and we may hope in the quiet of the 
West country. 

37. His Vision. — He paints his portrait as he was 
when he lived in Cornhill, a tall, gaunt figure, whom men 
called Long Will ; clothed in the black robes in which he 
sang for a few pence at the funerals of the rich ; hating 
to take his cap off his shaven head to bow to the lords 
and ladies that rode by in silver and furs as he stalked 
in observant moodiness along the Strand. It is this 
figure which in indignant sorrow walks through the 
whole poem. The dream of the ^' field full of folk," 
with which it begins, brings together nearly as many 



I 



II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 35 

t}^pical characters as the Tales of Chaucer do. In the 
first part, the truth sought for is righteous deahng in 
Church, and Law, and State. After the Prologue of the 
^•' field full of folk '■ and in it the Tower of Truth and the 
Dungeon where the Father of Falsehood lives, the Vision 
treats of Holy Church who tells the dreamer of Truth. 
Where is Falsehood? he asks. She bids him turn, and 
he sees Falsehood and Lady Meed, and learns that 
they are to be married. Theology interferes and all the 
parties go to London before the King. Lady Meed, 
arraigned on Falsehood's flight, is advised by the King 
to marry Conscience, but Conscience indignantly pro- 
claims her faults, and prophesies that one day Reason 
wall judge the world. On this the King sends for Reason, 
who, deciding a question against AVrong and in spite of 
Meed (or bribery), is begged by the King to remain 
with him. This fills four divisions or "'Passus."" The 
fifth Passus contains the confession of the Seven Deadly 
Sins, and is full of \dvid pictures of friars, robbers, nuns, 
of village hfe, of London alehouses, of all the vices of the 
time. It ends widi the search for Truth being taken up 
by aU the penitents, and then for the first time Piers 
Plowman appears and describes the way. He sets all 
who come to him to hard work, and it is here that the 
passages occur in which the labouring poor and their evils 
are dwelt upon. The seventh Passus introduces the bull 
of pardon sent by Truth (God the Father) to Piers. A 
Priest declares it is not vahd, and the discussion between 
him and Piers is so hot that the Dreamer awakes and 



56 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

ends with a fine outburst on the wretchedness of a trust 
in indulgences and the nobleness of a righteous life. 
This is the first part of the poem. 

In the second part the truth sought for is that of 
righteous life, to Do Well, to Do Better, to Do Best, the 
three titles of a new vision and a new pilgrimage. In a 
series of dreams and a highly-wrought allegory, Do Well, 
Do Bet, and Do Best are finally identified with Jesus 
Christ, who now appears as Love in the dress of Piers 
Plowman. Do Well is full of curious and important 
passages. Do Bet points out Christ as the Saviour of the 
World, describes His death, resurrection, and victory over 
Death and Sin. And the dreamer aw^akes in a transport 
of joy, wnth the Easter chimes pealing in his ears. But 
as Langland looked round on the world, the victory did 
not seem real, and the stern dreamer passed out of 
triumph into the dark sorrow in which he lived. He 
dreams again in Do Best, and sees, as Christ leaves the 
earth, the reign of Antichrist. Evils- attack the Church 
and mankind. Envy, Pride, and Sloth, helped by the 
Friars, besiege Conscience. Conscience cries on Contri- 
tion to help him, but Contrition is asleep, and Conscience, 
all but despairing, grasps his pilgrim staff and sets out to 
wander over the world, praying for luck and health, '^ till 
he have Piers the Plowman," till he find the Saviour. 
And then the dreamer wakes for the last time, weeping 
bitterly. This is the poem which displays to us that side 
of English society which Chaucer had not touched, and 
which wrought so strongly in men's minds that its moral 



TI FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 5/ 

influence was almost as widely spread as Wyclif s in the 
revolt which had now begun against Latin Christianity. 
Its fame was so great, that it produced imitators. About 
1394, another alliterative poem was set forth by an 
unknown author, with the title of Pierce the Plough7nan's 
Crede ; and the Plowman's Tale, wrongly attributed to 
Chaucer, is another witness to the popularity of Langland. 
-i^"^. Wyclif. — At the same time as the Vision was 
being read all over England, John Wyclif, about 1378, 
determined to give a full translation of the Bible to the 
English people in their own tongue. He himself trans- 
lated the New Testament. His assistant, Nicholas of 
Hereford, finished the Old Testament as far as Baruch, 
and Wyclif completed it. Some time after, John Purvey, 
under Wyclif, revised the whole, corrected its errors, 
did away with its Latinisms, and made it a book of 
sterling Enghsh — a book which had naturally a great 
power to fix and preserve words in our language. But 
Wyclif did much more than this for our tongue. He 
made it the popular language of religious thought 
and feeling. In 1381 he was in full battle with the 
Church on the doctrine of transubstantiation, and was 
condemned to silence. He replied by appealing to the 
whole of England in the speech of the people. He sent 
forth tract after tract, sermon after sermon, couched not 
in the dry, philosophic style of the schoolmen, but in 
short, sharp, stinging sentences, full of the homely words 
used in his own Bible, denying one by one almost all the 
doctrines, and denouncing the practices, of the Church of 



58 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Rome. He was our first Protestant. It was a new 
literary vein to open, the vein of the pamphleteer. With 
his work then, and with Langland's, we bring up to the 
year 1400 the EngHsh prose and poetry pertaining to 
religion, the course of which we have been tracing since 
the Conquest. 

39. Story-telling is the other line on which we have 
placed our literature, and it is now represented by John 
GowER. He belongs to a school older than Chaucer, 
inasmuch as he is scarcely touched by the Italian, but 
chiefly by the French influence. However, he had read 
Petrarca. Fifty Balades prove with what clumsy ease he 
could write in the French tongue about the affairs of love. 
As he grew older he grew graver, and partly as the 
religious and social reformer, and partly as the story- 
teller, he fills up the literary space between the spirit 
of Langland and Chaucer. In the church of St. Sav- 
iour, at Southwark, his head is still seen resting on his 
three great works, the Speculum Meditantis, the Vox 
Clamantis, the Confessio Ama7itis, 1393. It marks the 
unsettled state of our literary language, that each of 
these was written in a different tongue, the first in 
French, the second in Latin, the third in English. The 
first of these has been lost, but has lately been dis- 
covered at Cambridge. The second is a dream which 
passes into a sermon, cataloguing all the vices of the 
time, and is suggested by the peasant rising of 1381. 

The third, his English work, is a dialogue between a 
lover and his confessor a priest of Venus, and in its 



II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 59 

course, and with an imitation of Jean de ]\Ieung'3 part of 
the Roman de la Rose, all the passions and studies which 
may hinder love are dwelt upon, partly in allegory, and 
their operation illustrated by apposite stories, borrowed 
from the Gesta Romanoricm and from the Romances. 
But the book is in reality a better and larger collection 
of tales than was ever made before in English. The 
telling of the tales is wearisome, and the smoothness of 
the verse makes them more wearisome. But Gower was 
a careful v\Titer of English ; and in his satire of evils, 
and in his grave reproof of the follies of Richard II., 
he rises into his best strain. The king himself, even 
though reproved, was a patron of the poet. It was as 
Gower was rowing on the Thames that the royal barge 
drew near, and he was called to the king's side. " Book 
some new thing," said the king, '• in the way you are used, 
into which book I myself may often look; " and the re- 
quest was the origin of the Confession of a Lover, He 
ended by writing The Tripartite Chronicle, It is with 
pleasure that we turn from the learned man of talent 
to Geoffrey Chaucer — to the genius who called Gower, 
with perhaps some of the irony of an artist, ^' the moral 
Gower." 

40. Chaucer^s French Period. — Geoffrey Chaucer 
was the son of John Chaucer, a vintner, of Thames 
Street, London, and was born in 1340 or a year or two 
earher. He lived almost all his life in London, in the 
centre of its work and society. When he was sixteen he 
became page to the wife of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, 



6o ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

and continued at the court till he joined the army in 
France in 1359. He was taken prisoner, but ransomed 
before the treaty of Bretigny, in 1360. We then know- 
nothing of his life for seven years ; but from items in the 
Exchequer Rolls, we find that he was again connected 
with the court, from 1366 to 1372. He was made a 
valet of the king's chamber, and in 1368 an ^^ esquire 
of less degree." It was during this time that he began 
to write. We seem to have evidence that he composed 
in his wild youthful days a number of love poems, none 
of which have survived, but which gave him some fame 
as a poet. It is said that the A, B, C, a prayer to the 
Virgin, is the first of his extant poems, but some are in- 
clined to put it later. The translation of the Roman de 
la Rose which we possess is, with the exception of the 
first 1705 lines, denied to be his, but it is certain that he 
did make a translation of the French poem ; and there 
are a few who think that Chaucer's translation was made 
about 1380, and that it is completely lost. It is com- 
monly said that he wrote the Coinpleynt tcnto Fife, a 
tender and lovely little poem, before 1369. This was 
followed by the Boke of the Duchesse, in 1369, a pathetic 
allegory of the death of Blanche of Castile, whose hus- 
band, John of Gaunt, was Chaucer's patron. These, 
being written under the influence of French poetry, are 
classed under the name of Chaucer's first period. There 
are lines in them which seem to speak of a luckless love 
affair, and in this broken love it has been supposed we 
find some key to Chaucer's early life. However that 



II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 6l 

may be, he was married to Philippa Chaucer at some 
period between 1366 and 1374. Of the children of 
this marriage we only know certainly of one, Lewis, 
for whom he made his treatise on the Astrolabe. 

41. Chaucer *s Italian Period. — Chaucer's second poetic 
period may be called the period of Italian influence, from 
1372 to 1384. During these years he went for the king 
on four, perhaps five, diplomatic missions. Two of these 
were to Italy — the first to Genoa, Pisa, and Florence, 
1372-3; the second to Lombardy, 1378-9. At that 
time the great Italian literature which inspired then, 
and still inspires, European literature, had reached an 
astonishing excellence, and it opened to Chaucer a 
new world of art. His many quotations from Dante 
show that he had read the Divina Com7Jiedia, and we 
may well think that he then first learnt the full power 
and range of poetry. He read the Sonnets of Petrarca, 
and he learnt what is meant by "form" in poetry; but 
Petrarca never had the same power over him which 
Dante possessed. He read the tales and poems of 
Boccaccio, who made ItaHan prose, and in them he first 
saw how to tell a story exquisitely. Petrarca and Boc- 
caccio he may even have met, for they died in 1374 and 
1375, and Petrarca was in 1373 at Arqua, close to Padua, 
and employed on the Latin version of the story of Gri- 
silde, the version which Chaucer translated in the Clerk's 
tale. But Dante he could not see, for he had died at 
Ravenna in 132 1. When he came back from these 
journeys he was a new man. He threw aside the roman- 



62 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

tic poetry much in vogue, and perhaps laughed at it then 
in his gay and kindly manner in the Ri7ne of Sir Thopas, 
one of the Cante?'bury Tales, His chief work of this 
time bears witness to the influence of Italy. It was 
T?'oilus a?id Criseyde, 1380-3, a translation, with many 
changes and additions, of the Filo strata of Boccaccio. 
The additions (and he nearly doubled the poem) are 
stamped with his own pecuhar tenderness, vividness, and 
simplicity. His changes from the original are all tow- 
ards the side of purity, good taste, and piety. We 
meet the further influence of Boccaccio in the birth of 
some of the Ca?iterl?ury Tales, and of Petrarca in the 
Tales themselves. To this time is now referred the Lyf 
of Seint Cecyle, afterwards made the Second Nun's tale ; 
and the passionate religious fervour and repentance of 
this poem has seemed to point to a period of penitence 
in his life for his early sensuousness. It did not last 
long, and he now wrote the Sto?y of Grisilde, the Clerk's 
tale ; the Story of Constance, the Man of Law's tale ; 
the Monk's tale; the Compley7tt of Ma7^s ; the Com- 
pleynt to his Lady ; Anelida and Arcyte ; Troilus and 
Criseyde; the Lines to Adam Sc?ivener; To Rose- 
?nounde ; The Parleinent of Fonles ; Boece, a prose ver- 
sion of the De Consolatione ; the ILous of Fame, and 
the Legende of Good Women. In these two last poems 
we may trace, not only an Itahan, but a classical period 
in the work of Chaucer. This is the record of the work 
of the years between 1373 and 1384 ; and almost all 
these poems are either influenced by Dante or adapted 



II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 63 

from Petrarca and Boccaccio. In the passion with which 
Chaucer describes the ruined love of Troilus or Anehda, 
some have traced the lingering sorrow of his early love 
affair. But if this be true, it was now passing away, for 
in the creation of Pandarus in the Troilus, and in the 
delightful fun of that enchanting poem the Parleme7it 
of Foules, a new Chaucer appears, the humorous poet 
of some of the Cantei'bury Tales, The noble art of the 
Farlemenl, as well as that of the Troilus, Hfts Chaucer 
already on to that eminence apart where sit the great 
poets of the world. Nothing like this had appeared 
before in England. Nothing like it appeared again till 
Spenser. In the active business hfe he led during the 
period his poetry was likely to win a closer grasp on 
human life, for he was not only employed on service 
abroad, but also at home. In 1374 he was Comptroller 
of the Wool Customs, in 1382 of the Petty Customs, 
and in 1386 Knight of the Shire for Kent. 

42. Chaucer's English Period. — It is in the next 
period, from 1384 to 1390, that he left behind (except 
in the borrowing of his subjects) ItaUan influence as he 
had left French, and became entirely himself, entirely 
English. The comparative poverty in which he now 
lived, and the loss of his offices in 1386, for in John of 
Gaunt's absence court favour was withdrawn from him, 
and the death of his wife in 1387, may have given him 
more time for study and the retired life of a poet. His 
appointment as Clerk of the Works in 1389 brought him 
again into contact with men. He superintended the 



64 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

repairs and building at the Palace of Westminster, the 
Tower, and St. George's Chapel, Windsor, till July, 1391, 
when he was superseded, and lived on pensions allotted 
to him by Richard II. and by Henry IV., after he had 
sent Henry in 1399 his Compleint to his Purse, Before 
1390, however, he had added to his great work its most 
EngUsh tales ; those of the Miller, the Reeve, the Cook, 
the Wife of Bath, the Merchant, the Friar, the Nun's 
Priest, the Pardoner, and perhaps the Sompnour. The 
Prologue w^as probably written in 1388. In these, in 
their humour, in their vividness of portraiture, in their 
ease of narration, and in the variety of their characters, 
Chaucer shines supreme. A few smaller poems belong 
to this time, such as the Former Age ; Fortune ; Truth ; 
Getitllesse ; and the Lak of Steadfast?iesse. 

During the last ten years of his life, which may be 
called the period of his decay, he wrote some small 
poems, and along with the Cojupleynt of Venus, and a 
prose treatise on the Astrolabe, three more Canterbury 
tales, the Canon's-yeoman's, Manciple's, and Parson's. 
The last was written the year of his death, 1400. Having 
done this work he died in a house under the shadow 
of the Abbey of Westminster. Within the walls of the 
Abbey Church, the first of the poets who lies there, 
that ^^ sacred and happy spirit " sleeps. 

43. Chaucer's Character. — Born of the tradesman class, 
Chaucer was in every sense gf the word one of our finest 
gentlemen : tender, graceful in thought, glad of heart, 
humorous, and satirical without unkindness ; sensitive to 



II FRO:^I THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 05 

every change of feeling in himself and others, and there- 
fore fall of sympathy ; brave in misfortune, even to mirth, 
and doing well and with careful honesty all he undertook. 
His first and great delight was in human nature, and he 
makes us love the noble characters in his poems, and feel 
with kindliness towards the baser and ruder sort. He 
never sneers, for he had a wide charity, and we can 
ahvays smile in his pages at the folhes and forgive the 
sins of men. He had a quiet and true religion, much 
like that we conceive Shakespeare to have had ; nor was 
he without a high philosophic strain. Both were kept in 
order by his imagination and his humour. He had a 
true and chivalrous regard for women of his own class, 
and his wife and he ought to have been very happy if 
they had fulfilled the ideal he had of marriage. He lived 
in aristocratic society, and yet he thought him the great- 
est gentleman who was the most courteous and the most 
virtuous. He lived frankly among men, and as we have 
seen, saw many different types of men, and in his own 
time filled many parts as a man of the world and of busi- 
ness. Yet, with all this active and observant life, he was 
commonly very quiet and kept much to himself. ^^ Flee 
from the press and dwell with steadfastness " is the first 
fine of his last baUad, and it embodies, with the rest of 
that personal poem, the serious part of his life. The 
Host in the Tales japes at him for his lonely, abstracted 
air. ^'Thou lookest as thou wouldest find a hare. And 
ever on the ground I see thee stare." Being a good 
scholar, he read morning and night alone, and he says 



66 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

that after his (office) work he would go home and sit at 
another book as dumb as a stone, till his look was dazed. 
While at study and when he was making of songs and 
ditties, ^^ nothing else that God had made " had any in- 
terest for him. There was but one thing that roused him 
then, and that too he liked to enjoy alone. It was the 
beauty of the morning and the fields, the woods, and 
streams, and flowers, and the singing of the little birds. 
This made his heart full of revel and solace, and when 
spring came after winter, he rose with the lark and cried 
'^Farewell, my book and my devotion." He was a keen 
observer of the nature he cared for, especially of colour. 
He loved the streams and the birds and soft grassy 
places and green trees, and all sweet, ordered gardens, 
and flowers. He could spend the whole day, he says, in 
gazing alone on the daisy, and though what he says is 
symbolic, yet we may trace through the phrase that 
lonely delight in natural scenery which is so special a 
mark of our later poets. He lived thus a double life, in 
and out of the world, but never a gloomy one. For he 
was fond of mirth and good-living, and when he grew 
towards age, was portly of waist, no poppet to embrace. 
But he kept to the end his elfish countenance, the shy, 
dehcate, half-mischievous face which looked on men 
from its gray hair and forked beard, and was set off by 
his dark-coloured dress and hood. A knife and ink-horn 
hung on his dress ; we see a rosary in his hand ; and 
when he was alone he walked swiftly. 

44. The Canterbury Tales. — Of his work it is not 



II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 6/ 

easy to speak briefly, because of its great variety. Enough 
has been said of it, with the exception of his most com- 
plete creation, the Canterbin-y Tales. It will be seen 
from the dates given above that they were not written at 
one time. They are not, and cannot be looked on as a 
whole. INIany were wTitten independently, and then fitted 
into the framework of the Prologue. Many, which he 
intended to write in order to complete his scheme, were 
never wTitten. But we may say that the full idea of his 
work took shape about 1385, after he had finished The 
Legende of Good Women, and that the whole existing 
body of the Tales w^as completed, with the exception of 
the last three already mentioned, before the close of 
1390. At intervals, from time to time, he added a tale; 
in fact, the wdiole w^as done much in the same way as 
Tennyson has written his Idylls of the King. The manner 
in which he knitted them together was very simple, and 
likely to please the English people. The holiday ex- 
cursions of the time were the. pilgrimages, and the most 
famous and the pleasantest 'pilgrimage to go, especially 
for Londoners, was the three or four days' journey to see 
the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury. Persons of all 
ranks in life met and travelled together, starting from a 
London inn. Chaucer had probably made the pilgrimage 
to Canterbury in the spring of 1385 or 1387, and was led 
by this experience to the framework in which he set his 
pictures of life. He grouped around the jovial host of 
the Tabard Inn men and women of every class of society 
in England, set them on horseback to ride to Canterbury 



68 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

and home again, intending to make each of them tell 
tales. No one could hit off a character better, and in 
his Prologue, and in the prologues to the several Tales, 
a great part of the new, vigorous Enghsh society which 
had grown up since Edward I. is painted with astonishing 
vividness. '' I see all the pilgrims in the Canterbury 
Tales, '^ says Dryden, ^^ their humours, their features, and 
the very dress, as distinctly as if I had supped with them 
at the Tabard in Southwark." The Tales themselves 
take in the whole range of the poetry and the life of the 
Middle Ages ; the legend of the saint, the romance of the 
knight, the wonderful fables of the traveller, the coarse 
tale of common life, the love story, the allegory, the 
animal-fable, and the satirical lay. And they are pure 
tales. He is not in any sense a dramatic writer ; he is 
our greatest story-teller in verse. All the best tales are 
told easily, sincerely, with great grace, and yet with so 
much homeliness, that a child would understand them. 
Sometimes his humour is broad, sometimes sly, some- 
times gay, but it is also exquisite and affectionate. His 
pathos does not go into the far depths of sorrow and pain, 
but it is always natural. He can bring tears into our eyes, 
and he can make us smile or be sad as he pleases. 

His eye for colour was superb and distinctive. He 
had a very fine ear for the music of verse, and the tale 
and the verse go together like voice and music. Indeed, 
so softly flowing and bright are they, that to read them 
is like listening in a meadow full of sunshine to a clear 
stream rippling over its bed of pebbles. The English in 



II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 69 

which they are written is ahiiost the EngHsh of our 
time; and it is Hterary English. Chaucer made our 
tongue into a true means of poetry. He did more, he 
welded together the French and English elements in 
our language and made them into one English tool for 
the use of literature, and all our prose writers and poets 
derive their tongue from the language of the Canterbury 
Tales, They give him honour for this, but still more for 
that he was so fine an artist. Poetry is an art, and the 
artist in poetry is one who writes for pure and noble 
pleasure the thing he writes, and who desires to give to 
others the same or a similar pleasure by his poems 
which he had in writing them. The things he most 
cares about are that the form in which he puts his 
thoughts or feelings may be perfectly fitting to the sub- 
jects : and that subject, matter, and form should be as 
beautiful as possible — but for these he cares very 
greatly ; and in this Chaucer stands apart from the other 
poets of his time. Gower wrote with a set object, and 
nothing can be less beautiful than the form in which he 
puts his tales. The author of Piers Plowman wrote with 
the object of reform in social and ecclesiastical affairs, 
and his form is uncouth and harsh. Chaucer wrote be- 
cause he was full of emotion and joy in his own thoughts, 
and thought that others would weep and be glad with 
him, and the only time he ever moralises is in the tales of 
the Canon's Yeoman and the Manciple, written in his de- 
cay. He has, then, the best right to the poet's name. He 
is, within his own range, the clearest of English artists. 



JO ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Finally, his position in the history of EngUsh poetry 
and towards his own time resembles that of Dante, whom 
he loved so well, in the history and poetry of Italy. 
Dante embodied all the past elements of the Middle 
Ages in his work, and he began the literature, the 
thoughts, and the power of a new age. He was the 
Evening Star of the Mediaeval day and the Morning 
Star of the Renaissance. Chaucer also represented med- 
isevalism though in a much more incomplete way than 
Dante, but he had, so far as poetry in England is con- 
cerned, more of the Renaissance spirit than Dante. He 
is more humanistic than even Spenser. England needed 
to Uve more than a century to get up to the level of 
Chaucer. Lastly, both Dante and he made their own 
country's tongue the tongue of noble literature. 

45. The Travels of Sir John Maundevile belong to 
this place which treats of story-telling. Whatever other 
English prose arose in the fourteenth century was theo- 
logical or scientific. John of Trevisa had, among other 
Enghsh translations, turned into Enghsh prose, 1387, 
the Polychronicon of Ranulf Higden. Various other 
prose treatises, beginning with those of Richard RoUe, 
had appeared. Chaucer himself translated two of his 
tales, that of the Parson, and that of Mehboeus, from 
the French into an involved prose ; and wrote in the 
same rude vehicle, his Boece^ and his book on the 
Astrolabe. We have already noticed the prose of Wyc- 
lif. But Maundevile'' s Travels is a story-book. Maun- 
devile himself, the quaint and pleasant knight, is as 



II FROM THE COxXQUEST TO CHAUCER /I 

much an invention as Robinson Crusoe, and the travels 
as much an imposture as Geoffrey's History of the Kings 
of Britain, But they had a similar charm, and when 
made up originally by Jean de Bourgogne, a physician 
who died at Liege in 1372, were received with dehght 
and belief by the world, and nowhere with greater 
pleasure than in England, where they were translated 
into Enghsh prose by an anonymous writer of the late 
fourteenth or more probably fifteenth century. The 
prose is garrulous and facile, ghding with a pleasure 
in itself from legend to travellers' tales, from dreams 
to facts, from St. Albans to Jerusalem, from Cairo to 
Cathay. The book became a model of prose, and may 
even be called an early classic. 



72 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 



CHAPTER III 

FROM Chaucer's death 1400, to Elizabeth, 1558 

46. The Fifteenth Century Poetry. — The last poems 
of Chaucer and Langland bring our story up to 1400. 
The hundred years that followed are the most barren 
in our literature. The influence of Chaucer lasted, and 
of the poems attributed to him, but now rejected by 
scholars, some certainly belong to the first half of this 
century. There are fifty poems, making up 17,000 lines, 
which have been wrongly attributed to Chaucer, and 
though some of them were contemporary with him, a 
number are by imitators of his in the fifteenth century. 
Some of these have a great charm. The Cuckoo and 
the Nightingale is a pleasant thing. The Complaint of 
the Black Knight is by Lydgate. The Court of Love 
and Chaucer's Dream are good but late imitations of 
the master. The Flower and the Leaf is by a woman 
whose name we should like to know, for the poem is 
lovely. '' Moder of God and Viigin inidefouled'' is by 
Hoccleve, and was long attributed to Chaucer. The 
triple Roimdel, Merciles Beaute, is given by Professor 
Skeat to Chaucer, and at least is worthy of the poet ; 



Ill FROxM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 73 

and the Amorous Compleint and a Ballade of Com- 
pleynt, may possibly be also his. There was then a 
considerable school of imitators, who followed the style, 
who had some of the imaginative spirit, but who failed 
in the music and the art of Chaucer. 

47. Thomas Hoccleve and John Lyfgate. — Two of 
these imitators stand out from the rest by the extent 
of their work. Hoccleve, a London man, was a monot- 
onous versifier of the reigns of the three Henries, but 
he loved Chaucer well. In the MS. of his longest 
poem, the Governail of Princes, written before 14 13, 
he caused to be drawn, with fond idolatry, the portrait 
of his ^^ master dear and father reverent," who had 
enlumined all the land with his books. He had a 
style of his own. Sometimes, in his playful imitations 
of Chaucer's Balades, and in his devotional poetry, 
such as his Moder of God, he reached excellence ; but 
his didactic and controversial aims finally overwhelmed 
his poetry. 

48. John Lydgate was a more worthy follower of 
Chaucer. A monk of Bury, and thirty years of age 
when Chaucer died, he yet wrote nothing of much 
importance till the reign of Henry V. He was a gay 
and pleasant person, though a long-winded poet, and 
he seems to have lived even in his old age, when he 
recalls himself as a boy ^^ weeping for naught, anon 
after glad," the fresh and natural hfe of one who en- 
joyed everything ; but, like many gay persons, he had 
a vein of melancholy, and some of his best work, at 



74 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

least in the poet Gray's opinion, belongs to the realms 
of pathetic and moral poetry. But there was scarcely 
any hterary work he could not do. He rhymed history, 
ballads, and legends, till the monastery was delighted. 
He made pageants for Henry VI., masques and May- 
games for aldermen, mummeries for the Lord Mayor, 
and satirical ballads on the follies of the day. It is 
impossible here to mention the tenth part of his mul- 
tifarious works, many of which are as yet unpublished. 
They are a strange mixture of the poet striving to be 
rehgious, and of the monk carried away by his passions 
and his gaiety. He may have been educated at Oxford, 
and perhaps travelled in France and Italy; he knew 
the hterature of his time, and he even dabbled in the 
sciences. He was as much a lover of nature as Chau- 
cer, but cannot make us feel the beauty of nature in 
the same way. It is his story-telling which links him 
closest to his master. His three chief poems are, first, 
The Troye Book, which is adapted from Guido's His- 
toria T7^oJa?ia ; secondly, the Storie of Thebes, which 
is introduced as an additional Canterbury Tale, and is 
worked up from French romances on this subject. 
The third is the Falles of Princes, 1424-5, at which 
he worked till he was sixty years of age. It is a free 
translation of a French version of Boccaccio's De Cas- 
ibtcs Viro7'um et Feminariim Illustrinm. It tells the 
tragic fates of great men and women from the time 
of Adam to the capture of King John of France at 
Poitiers. The plan is picturesque ; the sorrowful dead 



Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 75 

appear before Boccaccio, pensive in his library, and 
each tells of his downfall. This is Lydgate's most im- 
portant, but by no means his best, poem ; and it had 
its influence on the future, for in the Mirror for Mag- 
istrates^ at least eight Elizabethan poets united at differ- 
ent times to supplement his Falles of Princes, 

A few minor poets do no more now than keep poetry 
alive. Another version of the Troy Story in Henry VI. 's 
time ; Hugh de Campeden's Sidrac, Thomas Chestre's 
Lay of Sir Launfal, and the translation of the Earl of 
Toulouse^ prove that romances were still taken from the 
French. William Lichfield's Cojuplaiitt between God and 
Man, and William Nassington's Mirronr of Life, carry 
on the rehgious, and the Totcr7iament of Tottenham the 
satirical, poetry. John Capgrave's translation of the Life 
of St. Catherine is less known than his Chrofiicle of 
England <ltdi\C2i\.td. to Edward IV. He, with John Hard- 
ing, a soldier of Agincourt, whose rhyming Chronicle 
belongs to Edward IV. 's reign, continue the historical 
poetry. A number of obscure versifiers, Thomas Norton, 
and George Ripley who wrote on alchemy, and Dame 
Juliana Berners' book on Hunting, bring us to the reign 
of Henry VIL, when Skelton first began to write. Mean- 
while poetry, which had decayed in England, was 
flourishing in Scotland. 

49. Ballads, lays, fragments of romances, had been 
sung in England from the earliest times, and popular 
tales and jokes took form in short lyric pieces, to be ac- 
companied with music and dancing. In fact, the ballad 



76 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

went over the whole land among the people. The trader, 
the apprentices, and poor of the cities, the peasantry, had 
their own songs. They tended to collect themselves 
round some legendary name like Robin Hood, or some 
historical character made legendary, hke Randolf, Earl 
of Chester. In the fourteenth century. Sloth, in Piers 
Plow7?ia7i, does not know his paternoster, but he does 
know the rhymes of these heroes. Robin Hood was then 
well known in 1370. A crowd of minstrels sang them 
through city and village. The very friar sang them, " and 
made his English swete upon his tonge." The Tale of 
Gamelyn is a piece of minstrel poetry, of the forest type, 
and drew to it, as we know, the attention of Chaucer. 
Chaucer and Langland mention the French ballads which 
were sung in London, and these were freely translated. 
The popular song, "When Adam dalf and Eve span," 
was a type of a class of sociahstic ballads. The Battle of 
Otterboiirne and The Hunting of the Cheviot were no 
doubt composed in the fourteenth century, but were not 
pubhshed till now. Two collections of Robin Hood bal- 
lads and The Nut Brown Maid, printed about the begin- 
ning of the sixteenth century, show that a fresh interest 
had then awakened in this outlaw literature to which we 
owe so much. It was not, however, till much later that 
any large collection of ballads was made ; and few, in the 
form we possess them, can be dated farther back than 
the reign of Elizabeth. 

50. Prose Literature. — Four men continued English 
prose into the fifteenth century. The religious war be- 



Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH // 

tween the Lollards and the Church raged durnig the reigns 
of Henry V. and Henry Yl., and m the time of the 
latter Reginald Pecock took it out of Latin into homely 
English. He fought the Lollards with their own weapons, 
with pubUc sermons in Enghsh, and with tracts in Eng- 
lish ; and after 1449, when Bishop of Chichester, published 
his works, T/ie Repressor of over much Blaming of the 
Clergy and The Book of Faith, They pleased neither 
party. The Lollards disliked them because they defended 
the customs and doctrines of the Church. Churchmen 
burnt them because they agreed with the '^Bible-men," 
that the Bible was the only rule of faith. Both abjured 
them because they said that doctrines were to be proved 
from the Bible by reason. Pecock is the first of all the 
Church theologians who wrote in English, and his books 
are good examples of our early prose. 

Sir John Fortescue's book on the Difference between 
Absolute and Limited Monarc/iy, in Edward IV. 's reign, 
is less fine an example of the prose of English politics 
than Sir Tho:^ias ]\L\lory's Morte DartJiur is of the 
prose of chivalry. This book, arranged and modelled 
into a labyrinthine story from French and contemporary 
EngHsh materials, is the work of a man of genius, and 
was ended in the ninth year of Edward IV., fifteen years 
before Caxton had finished printing it. Its prose, in its 
joyous simplicity, may well have charmed Caxtox, who 
printed it with all the care of one who ''^ loved the noble 
acts of chivalry." Caxton's own work added to the 
prose of England. PJorn of Kentish parents, he went to 



y8 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

the Low Countries in 1440, and learned his trade. The 
first book said to have been printed in this country was 
T/ie Game and Play e of the Chesse, 1474. The first book 
that bears the inscription, '' Imprynted by me, WilHam 
Caxton, at Westmynstre," is The Dictes and Sayings of 
Philosophers, But the first Enghsh book Caxton made, 
and finished at Cologne in 147 1, was his translation of 
the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troy, and in this book, 
and in his translation oi Reynard the Foxixovix the Dutch, 
in his translation of the Golden Legend, and his re- 
editing of Trevisa's Chronicle, in which he " changed the 
rude and old EngHsh," he kept, by the fixing power of 
the press, the Midland English, which Chaucer had es- 
tablished as the tongue of Kterature, from further degrada- 
tion. Forty years later Tyndale's New Testament fixed 
it more firmly, and the Elizabethan writers kept it in its 
purity. 

51. The Foundations of the Elizabethan Literature. — 
The first of these may be found in Caxton's work. John 
Shirley, a gentleman of good family, and Chaucer's con- 
temporary, who died, a very old man, in 1449, deserves 
mention as a transcriber and preserver of the works of 
Chaucer and Lydgate, but Caxton fulfilled the task Shir- 
ley had begun. He printed Chaucer and Lydgate and 
Gower with zealous care. He printed the Ch^^onicle of 
the Brut ; he secured for us the Morte Darthur. He 
had a tradesman's interest in pubHshing the romances, 
for they were the reading of the day ; but he could 
scarcely have done better for the interests of the coming 



Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 79 

literature. These books nourished the imagination of 
England, and supplied poet after poet with fine subjects 
for work, or fine frames for their subjects. He had not 
a tradesman's, but a loving literary, interest in printing the 
old English poets ; and in sending them out from his 
press Caxton kept up the continuity of English poetry. 
The poets after him at once began on the models of 
Chaucer and Gower and Lydgate ; and the books them- 
selves being more widely read, not only made poets but 
a pubhc that loved poetry. The imprinting of old Eng- 
hsh poetry was one of the sources in this century of the 
Elizabethan literature. 

The second source was the growth of an interest in 
classic literature. All through the last two-thirds of this 
century, though so little creative work was done, the 
interest in that hterature grew among men of the upper 
classes. The Wars of the Roses did not stop the reading 
of books. The Paston Letters^ 142 2-1 5 09, the corre- 
spondence of a country family from Henry VI. to Henry 
Vn., are pleasantly, even correctly written, and contain 
passages which refer to translations of the classics and to 
manuscripts sent to and fro for reading. A great number 
of French translations of the Latin classics were read in 
England. Henry V. and VL, Edward IV., and some of 
the great nobles were lovers of books. Men hke Duke 
Humphrey of Gloucester made Hbraries and brought over 
Itahan scholars to England to translate Greek works. 
There were even scholars in England, like John, Lord 
Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, who had won fame in the 



80 ENGLISH LITERATURE ' CHAP. 

schools of Italy, and whose translations of Cicero's De 
Amicitid and of Caesar's De Bcllo Gallico prove, with his 
Latin letters, how worthy he was of the praise of Padua 
and the gratitude of Oxford. He added many MSS. to 
the library of Duke Humphrey. The two great universi- 
ties were also now reformed ; new colleges were founded, 
new hbraries were established, Greek, Latin, and Italian 
MSS. were collected in them. The New Learning had 
begun to move in these great centres. x\ number of uni- 
versity men went to study in Italy, to Padua, Bologna, 
and Ferrara. i\mong these were Robert Flemmyng, 
Dean of Lincoln ; John Gunthorpe, Dean of Wells ; 
William Grey, Bishop of Ely ; John Phreas, Provost 
of Balliol ; WilKam Sellynge, Fellow of x-\ll Souls, all of 
whom collected ]\ISS. in Italy of the classics, with which 
they enriched the libraries of England. It is in this grow- 
ing influence of the great classic models of literature that 
we find the gathering together of another of the sources 
of that Ehzabethan literature which seems to flower so 
suddenly, but which had been long preparing. 

52. The Italian Revival of Learning. — The impulse, 
as we see, came from Italy, and was due to that great 
humanistic movement which we call the Renaissance, 
and which had properly begun in Italy with Dante and 
his circle, with Petrarca and Boccaccio, with Giotto and 
Nicolo Pisano. It carried with it, as it went on reviving 
the thought, literature and law of Greece and Rome, the 
overthrow of Feudalism and the romantic poetry of the 
Middle Ages. It made classic literature and art the basis 



Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 8 1 

of a new literature and a new art, which was not at first 
imitative, save of excellence of form. It began a new 
worship of beauty, a new worship of knowledge, and a 
new statesmanship. It initiated those new views of man 
and of human life, of its aims, rights, and duties, of its 
pleasures and pains, of rehgion, of knowledge, and of the 
whole course of the history of the world, which produced, 
as they fell on various types of humanity, the Refor- 
mation, a semi-pagan freedom of thought and life, the 
theories and ideas which took such furious form in the 
French Revolution, the boundless effort which attempted 
all things, and the boundless curiosity which penetrated 
into every realm of thought and feeling, and considered 
nothing too sacred or too remote for investigation by 
knowledge or for representation in art. At every one of 
those points it has affected literature up to the present day. 
No sooner had Petrarca and Boccaccio started it than 
Italy began to send eager searchers over Europe and 
chiefly to Constantinople. For more than seventy years 
before that city was taken by the Turk, shoals of J\ISS. 
had been carried from it into Italy together with a host 
of objects of ancient art. Before 1440 the best Latin 
classics and many of the Greek, were known, and were 
soon studied, lectured on, imitated, and translated. By 
1460 Italy, in all matters of thought, hfe, art, literature, 
and knowledge, was like a hive of bees in a warm sum- 
mer. We have seen with what slowness this vast impulse 
was felt in England in the fifteenth century. But it had 
begun, and in Elizabeth's time, pouring into England, it 

G 



82 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

went forth conquering and to conquer. As France 
dominated the literature of E^ngland after the Conquest, 
till Chaucer, touched by Italy, made it English, so Italy 
dominated it till Shakespeare and his fellows, touched 
also by Italy, made it again English. 

53. There was now a Transition Period both in 
Prose and Poetry, — The reigns of Richard III. and 
Henry VII. brought forth no prose of any worth, but 
the country awakened into its first Renaissance with the 
accession of Henry VIIL, 1509. John Colet, Dean of St. 
Paul's, with WilHam Lilly, the grammarian, set on foot a 
school where the classics were taught in a new and prac- 
tical way, and between the year 1500 and the Reforma- 
tion twenty grammar-schools were estabhshed. Erasmus, 
who had all the enthusiasm which sets others on fire, had 
come to England in 1497, and found Grocyn and Linacre 
at Oxford, teaching the Greek they had learnt from Chal- 
condylas at Florence. He learnt Greek from them, and 
found eager admiration of his own scholarship in Bishop 
Fisher, Sir Thomas More, Colet, and Archbishop War- 
ham. From these men a liberal and moderate theology 
spread, which soon, however, perished in the heats of the 
Reformation. But the New Learning they had started 
grew rapidly, assisted by the munificence of Wolsey; and 
Cambridge, under Cheke and Smith, excelled even Ox- 
ford in Greek learning. The study of the great classics 
set free the minds of men, stirred and gave hfe to letters, 
woke up English prose from its sleep, and kindled the 
young English intelligence in the universities. Its earliest 



Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 83 

prose was its best. It was in 15 13 (not printed till 1557) 
that Thomas iVIore wrote the history in Enghsh, of 
Edward V.'s Hfe and Richard III.'s usurpation. The 
simphcity of his genius showed itself in the style, and 
his wit in the picturesque method and the dramatic 
dialogue that graced the book. This stately historical 
manner w^as laid aside by More in the tracts of nervous 
English with which he replied to Tyndale, but both his 
styles are remarkable for their purity. Of all the ^' strong 
words " he uses, three out of four are Teutonic. ]\Iore's 
most famous work, the Utopia, 15 16, was wTitten in 
Latin, but was translated afterwards, in 1551, by Ralph 
Robinson. It tells us more of the curiosity the New 
Learning had awakened in Englishmen concerning all 
the problems of life, society, government, and religion, 
than any other book of the time. It is the representative 
book of that short but w^ell-defined period w^hich we may 
Cdii[ English Renaissaiice before the Reformation. We see 
in all this movement another of the sources of the Eliza- 
bethan outburst. jNIuch of the progress of prose was due 
to the patronage of the young king. It was the king who 
asked Lord Berners to translate Froissart, a translation 
which in 1523 made a landmark in our tongue. It was 
the king who supported Sir Thomas Elyot in his effort to 
improve education, and encouraged him to write books 
(1531-46) in the vulgar tongue that he might please 
his countrymen. It was the king who made Leland, 
our first English writer on antiquarian subjects, the 
^* King's Antiquary," 1533. It was the king to w^hom 



84 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Roger Ascham dedicated his first work, and who sent 
huTi abroad to pursue his studies. This book, the 
Toxophilus^ or the School of Shootings ^545^ ^^^s writ- 
ten for the pleasure of the yeomen and gentlemen of 
England in their own tongue. Ascham apologises for 
this, and the apology marks the state of English prose. 
^^ Everything has been done excellently w^ell in Greek 
and Latin, but in the English tongue so meanly that no 
man can do worse." But " I have written this English 
matter, in the English tongue for English men." Ascham's 
quaint English has its charm, and he did not know that 
the very rudeness of language of which he complained 
was in reality laying the foundations of an English more 
Teutonic and less Latin than the Enghsh of Chaucer. 

54. Prose and the Reformation. — The bigotry, the 
avarice, and the violent controversy of the Reformation 
killed for a time the New Learning, but the Reformation 
did a vast work for Enghsh literature, and prepared the 
language for the Elizabethan writers, by its version of 
the Bible. William Tyndale's Translation of the New 
Testaifient, 1525, fixed our standard English once for all, 
and brought it finally into every Enghsh home. Tyndale 
held fast to pure Enghsh. In his two volumes of poht- 
ical tracts '^ there are only twelve Teutonic words which 
are now obsolete, a strong proof of the influence his 
translation of the Bible has had in preserving the old 
speech of England." Of the 6000 words of the Author- 
ised Version^ still in a great part his translation, only 250 
are not now in common use. " Three out of four of his 



Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 85 

nouns, adverbs, and verbs are Teutonic." And he spoke 
sharply enough to those who said our tongue was so rude 
that the Bible could not be translated into it. ^' It is not 
so rude as they are false Hars. For the Greek tongue 
agreeth more with the Enghsh than the Latin ; a thou- 
sand parts better may it be translated into the English 
than into the Latin." 

Tyndale was helped in his English Bible by William 
Roy, a runaway friar; and his friend Rogers, the first 
martyr in Queen Mary's reign, added the translation of 
the Apocrypha^ and made up what was wanting in Tyn- 
dale's translation from Chronicles to Malachi out of 
Coverdale's translation. It was this Bible which, re- 
vised by Coverdale and edited and re-edited as Crom- 
luelVs Bible, ^539^ ^^d again as Cranmer's Bible, i540> 
was set up in every parish church in England. It got 
north into Scotland and made the Lowland English more 
like the London English. It passed over to the Prot- 
estant settlements in Ireland. After its revisal in 161 1 
it went with the Puritan Fathers to New England and 
fixed the standard of English in America. Many mill- 
ions of people now speak the English of Tyndale's Bible, 
and there is no book which has had, through the Au- 
thorised Version, so great an influence on the style of 
Enghsh literature and the standard of English prose. In 
Edward VI.'s reign also Cranmer edited the English 
Prayer Book, 1549-52. Its English is a good deal 
mixed with Latin words, and its style is sometimes weak 
or heavy, but on the whole it is a fine example of stately 



86 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

prose. It also steadied our speech. Latimer, on the 
contrary, whose Sermo7i on the Ploiighe^^s and others were 
dehvered in 1549 and in 1552, wrote in a plain, shrewd 
style, which by its humour and rude directness made him 
the first preacher of his day. On the whole the Refor- 
mation fixed and confirmed our Enghsh tongue, but at the 
same time it brought in through theology a large number 
of Latin words. The pairing of Enghsh and Latin words 
(acknowledge and confess, etc.) in the Prayer Book is 
a good example of both these results. 

55. Poetry in the Sixteenth Century under the In- 
fluence of Chaucer. — One source, we have said, of the 
Elizabethan literature, before Elizabeth, was the recovery, 
through Caxton's press, of Chaucer and his men. It is 
probable that the influence of Itahan literature on Enghsh 
poets was now kept from becoming overwhelming by the 
strong English element in Chaucer. At least this was 
one of the reasons for the clear poetic individuality of 
England ; and we can easily trace its balancing effect 
in Spenser. It was of importance, then, that before 
Surrey and Wyatt again brought Itahan elements into 
English verse, there should be a revival of Chaucer, 
both in England and Scotland. This transition period, 
short as it was, is of interest. Stephen Hawes, in the 
reign of Henry VIL, represented the transition by an 
imitation of the old work. Amid many poems, some 
more imitative of Lydgate than of Chaucer, his long alle- 
gorical poem, entitled the Pastime of Pleasure, is the 
best. In fact, it is the first, since the middle of the 



Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 8/ 

fifteenth century, in which Imagination again began to 
plume her wings and soar. Within the reahn of art, it 
corresponded to that effort to resuscitate the dead body 
of the Old Chivalry which Henry VIIL and Francis I. 
attempted. It goes back for its inspiration to the Ro- 
inance of the Rose, and is an allegory of the right educa- 
tion of a knight, showing how Grand Amour won at last 
La Bel Pucell. But, hke all soulless resurrections, it 
died quickly. 

On the other hand, John Skelton represents the 
transition by at first following the old poetry, and then, 
pressed upon by the storm of human life in the present, 
by taking an original path. His imitative poetry belongs 
mostly to Henry VII. 's time, but when the religious and 
political disturbances began in Henry VIII.'s time, 
Skelton became excited by the cry of the people for 
Church reformation. His poem, Why eome ye not to 
Court? was a fierce satire on the great Cardinal. That 
of Colin Clout was the cry of the country Colin, and of 
the Clout or mechanic of the town against the corruption 
of the Church ; and it represents the whole popular feel- 
ing of the time just before the movement of the Reforma- 
tion took a new turn from the opposition of the Pope to 
Henry's divorce. Both are written in short '^ rude rayling 
rimes, pleasing only the popular ear," and Skelton chose 
them for that purpose. He had a rough, impetuous 
power, but Skelton could use any language he pleased. 
He was an admirable scholar. Erasmus calls him the 
'^ glory and light of Enghsh letters," and Caxton says 



88 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

that he improved our language. His poem, the Bowge of 
Court (rewards of court), is full of powerful satire against 
the corruption of the times, and of vivid impersonations 
of the virtues and vices. But he was not only the satirist. 
The pretty and new love lyrics that we owe to him fore- 
shadow the Elizabethan imagination and life ; and the 
Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe, which tells, in imitation of 
Catullus, the grief of a nun called Jane Scrope for the 
death of her sparrow, is a gay and inventive poem. 
Skelton stands — • a landmark in Enghsh literature — be- 
tween the mere imitation of Chaucer and the rise of a new 
Italian influence in England in the poems of Surrey and 
Wyatt. In his own special work he was entirely original. 
The Ship of Fooles, 1508, by Barclay, is of this time, 
but it has no value. It is a paraphrase of a famous 
German work by Sebastian Brandt, published at Basel. 
It was popular because it attacked the follies and ques- 
tions of the time. Its sole interest to us is in its pictures 
of famihar manners and popular customs. But Barclay 
did other work, and he estabhshed the eclogue in Eng- 
land. With him the transition time is over, and the 
curtain is ready to rise on the Elizabethan age of poetry. 
While we wait, we will make an interlude out of the work 
of the poets of Scotland. 

SCOTTISH POETRY 

56. Scottish Poetry is poetry written in the English 
tongue by men living in Scotland. These men, though 
calling themselves Scotsmen, are of good English blood. 



Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 89 

But the blood, as I think, was mixed with a larger infu- 
sion of Celtic blood than elsewhere. 

Old Northumbria extended from the Humber to the 
Firth of Forth, leaving however on its western border a 
strip of unconquered land, which took in Lancashire, 
Cumberland, and Westmoreland in our England, and, 
over the border, most of the western country between 
the Clyde and Solway Firth. This unconquered country 
was the Welsh kingdom of Strathclyde, and was dwelt in 
by the Celtic race. The present EngKsh part of it was 
conquered and the Celts absorbed. But in the part to 
the north of the Solway Firth the Celts were not con- 
quered and not absorbed. They remained, lived with 
the Englishmen who were settled over the old Nor- 
thumbria, intermarried with them, and became under Scot 
kings a people with the Celtic elements more dominant 
in them than in the rest of our nation. English litera- 
ture in the Lowlands of Scotland would then retain more 
of these Celtic elements than elsewhere ; and there are 
certain pecuharities infused through the whole of English 
poetry in Scotland which are especially Celtic. 

57. Celtic Elements of Scottish Poetry. — The first 
of these is the love of wild nature fo?- its own sake. 
There is a passionate, close, and poetical observation and 
description of natural scenery in Scotland from the 
earliest times of its poetry, such as we do not possess in 
Enghsh poetry till the time of Thomson. The second is 
the love of colour. All early Scottish poetry differs from 
English in the extraordinary way in which colour is in- 



90 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

sisted on, and at times in the lavish exaggeration of it. 
The third is the wittier a?id coarse?' hu77ioicr in the Scot- 
tish poetry, which is distinctly Celtic in contrast with 
that humour which has its root in sadness and which be- 
longs to the Teutonic races. Few things are really more 
different than the humour of Chaucer and the humour of 
Dunbar, than the humour of Cowper and the humour of 
Burns. These are the special Celtic elements in the 
Lowland poetry. 

58. But there are also national elements in it which, 
exaggerated and isolated as they were, are also Celtic. 
The wild individuality of the Gaelic clans was not un- 
represented in the Lowland kingdom, and became there 
as assertive a nationality as Ireland has ever proclaimed. 
The English were as national as the Scots, but they were 
not oppressed. But for nearly forty years the Scots re- 
sisted for their very life the efforts of England to conquer 
them. And the war of freedom left its traces on their 
poetry from Barbour to Burns and Walter Scott in the 
almost obtrusive way in which Scotland, and Scottish 
liberty, and Scottish heroes are thrust forward in their 
verse. Their passionate nationality appears in another 
form in their descriptive poetry. The natural descrip- 
tion of Chaucer, Shakespeare, or even Milton, is not 
disdnctively Enghsh. But in Scotland it is always the 
scenery of their own land that the poets describe. Even 
when they are imitating Chaucer they do not imitate his 
conventional landscape. They put in a Scottish land- 
scape ; and in the work of such men as Gavvin Douglas 



Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 9I 

the love of Scotland and the love of nature mmgle their 
influences together to make him sit down^ as it were, to 
paint; with his eye on everything he paints, a series of 
Scottish landscapes. 

59. The first of the Scottish poets, omitting Thomas 
of Erceldoune, is John Barbour, Archdeacon of Aber- 
deen. His long poem of The Bruce, 1375-7, represents 
the whole of the eager struggle for Scottish freedom 
against the English which closed at Bannockburn ; and 
the national spirit, which I have mentioned, springs in it, 
full grown, into life. But it is temperate, it does not 
pass into the fury against England, which is so plain in 
writers Hke Blind Harry, who, about 146 1, composed a 
long poem in the heroic couplet of Chaucer on the deeds 
of William Wallace. In Henry Y.'s reign, Andrew of 
Wyntoun wrote his Oryginale Ci'onykil of Scotland^ one 
of the rhyming chronicles of the time. It is only in the 
next poet that we find the full influence of Chaucer, 
and it is thereafter continuous till the Elizabethan time. 
James the First of Scotland was prisoner in England 
for nineteen years, till 1422. There he read Chaucer, 
and fell in love with Lady Jane Beaufort, niece of 
Henry IV. The poem which he wrote — The King's 
Quair (the quire or book) — is done in imitation of 
Chaucer, and in Chaucer's seven-lined stanza, which 
from James's use of it is called "* Rime Royal." In six 
cantos, sweeter, tenderer, and purer than any verse till 
we come to Spenser, he describes the beginning of his 
love and its happy end. ^' I must write," he says, ''so 



92 ENGLISH LITERATURZ CHAP. 

much because I have come so from Hell to Heaven.'^ 
Though imitative of Chaucer, his work has an original 
element in it. The natural description is more varied, 
the colour is more vivid, and there is a modern self- 
reflective quality, a touch of mystic feeling which does 
not belong to Chaucer. 

Robert Henryson, who died about 1500, a school- 
master in Dunfermline, was also an imitator of Chaucer, 
and his Testavient of Cresseid continues Chaucer's 
Troihcs, But he did not do only imitative work. He 
treated the fables of ^sop in a new fashion. In his 
hands they are long stories, full of pleasant dialogue, 
political allusions, and with elaborate morals attached to 
them. They have a peculiar Scottish tang, and are full 
of descriptions of Scottish scenery. He also reanimated 
the short pastoral in his Robin and Makyne, It is a 
natural, prettily-turned dialogue; and a flashing Celtic 
wit, such as charms us in Diincaji Gray, runs through it. 
The individuality which reformed two modes of poetic 
work in these poems appears again in his sketch of the 
graces of womanhood in the Ga7'nie7it of Good Ladies ; 
a poem of the same type as those thoughtful lyrics which 
describe what is best in certain phases of professions, or 
of hfe, such as Sir H. Wotton's Character of a Happy 
Life, or Wordsv/orth's Happy Warrior, 

But among many poets whom we need not mention, 
the greatest is William Dunbar. He carries the in- 
fluence of Chaucer on to the end of the fifteenth century 
and into the sixteenth. His genius, though masculine, 



Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 93 

loved beauty, and his work was as varied in its range as 
it was original. He followed the form and plan of Chau- 
cer in his two poems of The Thistle and the Rose, 1503, 
and the Golden Terge, 1508, the first on the marriage of 
James IV. to Margaret Tudor, the second an allegory of 
Love, Beauty, Reason, and the poet. In both, though 
they begin with Chaucer's conventional May morning, 
the natural description becomes Scottish, and in both the 
national enthusiasm of the poet is strongly marked. But 
he soon ceased to imitate. The \'igorous fun of the 
satires and of the satirical ballads that he vn:ott is only 
matched by their coarseness, a coarseness and a fun that 
descended to Burns. Perhaps Dunbar's genius is still 
higher in a w41d poem in which he personifies the seven 
deadly sins, and describes their dance, with a mixture of 
horror and humour which makes the little thing unique. 

A man as remarkable as Dunbar is Gawix Douglas, 
Bishop of Dunkeld, who died in 1522, at the Court of 
Henry VIII. , and was buried in the Savoy. He trans- 
lated into verse Ovid's Art of Lore, now lost, and after- 
wards, with truth and spirit, the ySneids of Virgil, 1 5 1 3 . 
To each book of the ^neid he wrote a prologue of his 
own. Three of them are descriptions of the country in 
May, in Autumn, and in Winter. The scenery is alto- 
gether Scottish, and the few Chaucerisms that appear 
seem absurdly out of place in a picture of nature which 
is painted with excessive care and directly from the truth. 
The colour is superb, but the landscape is not composed 
by any art into a whole. There is nothing hke it in 



94 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

England till Thomson's Seasons, and Thomson was a 
Scotsman. Only the Celtic love of nature can account 
for the vast distance between work hke this and contem- 
porary work in England such as Skelton's. Of Douglas's 
other original work, one poem, the Palace of Honoicr, 
1501. continues the influence of Chaucer. 

There were a number of other Scottish poets who are 
all remembered by Dunbar in his Lament fo7' the Makars^ 
and praised by Sir David Lyndsay, whom it is best to 
mention in this place, because he still connects Scottish 
poetry with Chaucer. He was born about 1490, and was 
the last of the old Scottish school, and the most popular. 
He is the most popular because he is not only the poet, 
but also the reformer. His poem the Dre?ne, 1528, links 
him back to Chaucer. It is in the manner of the old 
poet. But its scenery is Scottish, and instead of the May 
morning of Chaucer, it opens on a winter's day of wind 
and sleet. The place is a cave over the sea, whence 
Lyndsay sees the weltering of the ocean. Chaucer goes 
to sleep over Ovid or Cicero, Lyndsay falls into a dream 
as he thinks of the '^ false world's instability," wavering 
like the sea waves. The difference marks not only the 
difference of the two countries, but the different natures 
of the men. Chaucer did not care much for the popular 
storms, and loved the Court more than the Commonweal. 
Lyndsay in the Dreme and in two other poems — the 
Co77iplai7it to the Ki7ig, and the Testa77ie7it of the Ki7ig's 
Papy7igo — is absorbed in the evils and sorrows of the 
people, in the desire to reform the abuses of the Church. 



Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 95 

of the Court, of party, of the nobility. In 1539 his 
Satire of the Three Estates, a ^^loraHty intersp^ersed with 
interludes, was represenied before James V. at Linhth- 
gow. It was a daring attack on the ignorance^ profli- 
gacy, and exactions of the priesthood, on the vices and 
flatter}' of the favourites — ''a mocking of abuses used in 
the country by diverse sorts of estates.'" A still bolder 
poem, and one thought so even by himself, is the Mon- 
archies 1553. his last work. He is as much the reformer, 
as he is the poet, of a transition time. Still his verse 
hath charms, but it was neither sweet nor imaginative. 
He had genuine satire, great moral breadth, much 
preaching power in verse, coarse, broad humour in 
plent}', and more dramatic power and invention than 
the rest of his fellows. 

60. The Elizabethan Dawn : Wyatt and Surrey. — 
While poetry under Skelton and Lyndsay became an 
instrument of reform, it revived as an art at the close of 
Henry VIIL's reign in Sir Thc-mas Wyatt and Lord 
Hexry Howard, Earl of Surrey. They were both Italian 
travellers, and in bringing back to England the inspi- 
ration they had gained from Italian and classic models 
they re-made Enghsh poetry. They are our first really 
modern poets ; the first who have anything of the modern 
manner. Though Italian in sentiment, their language is 
more English than Chaucer's, that is, they use fewer 
romance words. They handed down this purity of 
Enghsh to the Ehzabethan poets, to Sackville, Spenser, 



96 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

and Shakespeare. They mtroduced a new kind of poetry, 
the amourist poetry — a poetry extremely personal, and 
personal as English poetry had scarcely ever been before. 
The amourists, as they are called, were poets who com- 
posed a series of poems on the subject of the joys and 
sorrows of their loves — sonnets mingled with lyrical 
pieces after the manner of Petrarca, and sometimes in 
accord with the love philosophy he built on Plato. They 
began with Wyatt and Surrey. They did not die out till 
the end of James I.'s reign. The subjects of Wyatt and 
Surrey were chiefly lyrical, and the fact that they imitated 
the same model has made some likeness between them. 
Like their personal characters, however, the poetry of 
Wyatt is the more thoughtful and the more strongly felt, 
but Surrey's has a sweeter movement and a hveher fancy. 
Both did this great thing for Enghsh verse — they chose 
an exquisite model, and in imitating it '^ corrected the 
ruggedness of Enghsh poetry." A new standard was 
made below which the future poets should not fall. They 
also added new stanza measures to English verse, and 
enlarged in this way the ^Hyrical range." Surrey was 
the first, in his translation of the Second and Fourth 
Books of VirgiVs y^iieid^ to use the ten-syllabled, un- 
rhymed verse, which we now call blank verse. In his 
hands it is not worthy of praise. Sackville, Lord Buck- 
hurst, introduced it into drama ; Marlowe made it the 
proper verse of the drama. In plays it has a special 
manner of its own ; in poetry proper it was, we may say, 
not only created but perfected by Milton. 



Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 9/ 

The new impulse thus given to poetry was all but 
arrested by the bigotry that prevailed during the reigns 
of Edward VI. and i\Iary, and all the work of the New 
Learning seemed to be useless. But Thomas Wilson's 
book in EngUsh on Rhetoric and Logic in 1553, and the 
publication of Thomas Tusser's Pointes of Husband^He and 
of Tottel's Miscella?iy of Uncertain Authors, 1557, in the 
last year of Mary's reign, proved that something was 
stirring beneath the gloom. The Miscellany contained 
40 poems by Surrey, 96 by Wyatt, 40 by Grimoald, and 
134 by uncertain authors. The date should be remem- 
bered, for it is the first printed book of modern English 
poetry. It proves that men cared now more for the new 
than the old poets, that the time of mere imitation of 
Chaucer was over, and that of original creation begun. 
It ushers in the Elizabethan literature. 

H 



98 ENGLISH LITERATURE 



CHAPTER IV 

THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

6i. Elizabethan Literature, as a literature, may be 
said to begin with Surrey and Wyatt. But as their 
poems were pubhshed shortly before Elizabeth came to 
the throne, we date the beginning of the early period oi 
Elizabethan literature from the year of her accession, 
1558. That period lasted till 1579, ^^d was followed by 
the great literary outburst of the days of Spenser and 
Shakespeare. The apparent suddenness of this outburst 
has been an object of wonder. I have already noticed 
its earliest sources in the last hundred years. And now 
we shall best seek its nearest causes in the work done 
during the early years of Elizabeth. The flood-tide which 
began in 1579 was preceded by a very various, plentiful, 
but inferior literature, in which new forms of poetry and 
prose-writing were tried, and new veins of thought opened. 
These twenty years from the Mirror for Magistrates, 
1559? to the ShepheanVs Calendar, 1579, sowed seeds 
which when the time came broke into flower. We wonder 
at the flower, but it grew naturally through seed and stem, 
leaves and blossom. They made the flower, since the 



IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 99 

circumstances were favourable. And never in England, 
save in our own century, were they so favourable. 

62. First Elizabethan Period, 1558-1570. — (i.) The 
literary prose of the beginning of this time is represented 
by the Scholemaster of Ascham, published in 1570. This 
book, which is on education, is the work of the scholar of 
the New Learning of the reign of Henry VIII. who has 
lived on into another period. It is not, properly speak- 
ing, Ehzabethan ; it is like a stranger in a new land and 
among new manners. 

(2.) Poetry is first represented by Sackville, Lord 
Buckhurst. The Mirror for Magistj-ates, for which he 
wrote, 1563, the Induction and one tale, is a series of 
tragic poems on the model of Boccaccio's Falls of Princes, 
already imitated by Lydgate. Seven poets at least, with 
Sackville, contributed tales to it, but his poem is poetry 
of so fine a quality that it stands absolutely alone during 
these twenty years. The Induction paints the poet's 
descent into Avernus, and his meeting with Henry 
Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, whose fate he tells with 
a grave and inventive imagination, and with the first true 
music which we hear since Chaucer. Being written in 
the manner and stanza of the elder poets, this poem has 
been called the transition between Lydgate and Spenser. 
But it does not truly belong to the old time ; it is as 
modern as Spenser, and its allegorical representations 
are in the same manner as those of Spenser. George 
Gascoigne, whose satire, the Steele Glas, 1576, is our 
first long satirical poem, deserves mention among a 



lOO ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

crowd of poets who came after Sackville. They wrote 
legends, pieces on the wars and discoveries of the 
EngHshmen of their day, epitaphs, epigrams, songs, son- 
nets, elegies, fables, and sets of love poems ; and the best 
things they did were collected in such miscellaneous 
collections as \};\q Pctradise of Dainty Devices, m 1576. 
This book, with Tottel's, set on foot both now and in the 
later years of Elizabeth a crowd of other miscellanies of 
poetry which represent the vast number of experiments 
made in Elizabeth's time, in the subjects, the metres, 
and the various kinds of lyrical poetry. At present, all 
we can say is that lyrical poetry, and that which we may 
call '' occasional poetry," were now in full motion. The 
popular Ballads also took a wide range. The registers 
of the Stationers' Company prove that there was scarcely 
any event of the day, nor almost any controversy in lit- 
erature, politics, religion, which vv^as not the subject of 
verse, and of verse into which imagination strove to enter. 
The ballad may be said to have done the work of the 
modern weekly review. It stimulated and informed the 
popular intellectual life of England. 

(3.) Fi'cquent translations were now made from the 
classical writers. We know the names of more than 
twelve men who did this work, and there must have been 
many more. Already in Henry VIII.'s and Edward VI. 's 
time, ancient authors had been made EngUsh ; and now 
before 1579, Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Demosthenes, Plu- 
tarch, and many Greek and Latin plays, were translated. 
Among the rest, Phaer's Virgil, 1562, Arthur Golding's 



IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 10 1 

Ovid's Afetamorphoses, 1567, and George Turbervile's 
Historical Epistles of Orid, 1567, are, and especially the 
first, remarkable. The Enghsh people m this way were 
brought into contact, more than before, with the classical 
spirit, and again it had its awakening power. We cannot 
say that either the fineness or compactness of classic 
work appeared in these heterogeneous translations, 
though one curious result of them was the craze which 
followed, and which Gabriel Harvey strove, fortunately 
in vain, to impose on Spenser, for reproducing classical 
metres in English poetry. Nor were the old English 
poets neglected. Though Chaucer and Lydgate, Lang- 
land, and the rest, were no longer imitated in this time 
when fresh creation had begun, they were studied, and 
they added their impulse of life to original poets like 
Spenser. 

(4.) Theological Reform stirred men to another kind 
of literary work. A great number of polemical ballads, 
pamphlets, and plays issued every year from obscure 
presses and filled the land. Poets like George Gas- 
coigne and still more Barnaby Googe, represent in their 
work the hatred the young men had of the old religious 
system. It was a spirit which did not do much for 
literature, but it quickened the habit of composition, 
and made it easier. The Bible also became common 
property, and its language ghded into all theological 
writing and gave it a literary tone ; while the publica- 
tion of John Foxe's Acts aiid Monuments or Book of 
Martyrs^ 1563, gave to the people all over England a 



102 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

book which, by its simple style, the ease of its story- 
telling, and its popular charm made the very peasants 
who heard it read feel whsit is meant by hterature. 

(5.) The history of the comitry and its manners was 
not neglected. A w^iole class of antiquarians wrote 
steadily, if with some dulness, on this subject. Grafton, 
Stow, Holinshed, and others, at least supplied materials 
for the study and use of historical dramatists. 

(6.) T\i^ love of stories grew quickly. The old Eng- 
lish tales and ballads were eagerly read and collected. 
Italian tales by various authors were translated and 
sown so broadcast over London by William Painter in 
his collection, The Palace of Pleasure, 1566, by George 
Turbervile, in his Tragical Tales in verse, and by 
others, that it is said they w^ere to be bought at every 
bookstall. The Romances of Spain and Italy poured 
in, and Aviadis de Gaul, and the companion romances 
the Arcadia of Sannazaro and the Ethiopian History, 
w^ere sources of books like Sidney's Arcadia, and, with 
the classics, supplied materials for the pageants. A 
great number of subjects for prose and poetry were 
thus made ready for literary men, and prose fiction 
became possible in Enghsh literature. 

(7.) All over Europe, and especially in Italy, now 
closely linked to England, the Renaissance had pro- 
duced a wild spirit of exhausting all the possibihties 
of human life. Every form, every game of life, was 
tried, every fancy of goodness or wickedness followed 
for the fancy's sake. Men said to themselves ^^ Attempt, 



IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE IO3 

Attempt." The act accompanied the thought. Eng- 
land at last shared in this passion, but in Enghsh life 
it was directed. There was a great liberty given to 
men to live and do as they pleased, provided the 
queen was worshipped and there was no conspiracy 
against the State. That much direction did not apply 
to purely literary production. Its attemptings were 
unlimited. Anything, everything was tried, especially 
in the drama. 

(8.) The masques^ pageants, interludes, and plays that 
were written at this time are scarcely to be counted. 
At every great ceremonial, whenever the queen made 
a progress or visited one of the great lords or a uni- 
versity, at the houses of the nobility, and at the Court 
on all important days, some obscure versifier, or a 
young scholar at the Inns of Court, at Oxford or at 
Cambridge, produced a masque or a pageant, or wrote 
or translated a play. The habit of play-writing became 
common ; a kind of school, one might almost say a 
manufacture of plays, arose, which partly accounts for 
the rapid production, the excellence, and the multitude 
of plays that we find after 1576. Represented all over 
England, these masques, pageants, and dramas were 
seen by the people, who were thus accustomed to take 
an interest, though of an uneducated kind, in the larger 
drama that was to follow. The literary men on the 
other hand ransacked, in order to find subjects and 
scenes for their pageants, ancient and mediaeval, magi- 
cal, and modern literature, and many of them in doing 



I04 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

SO became not fine but multifarious scholars. The 
imagination of England was quickened and educated 
in this way, and as Biblical stories were well known 
and largely used, the images of oriental life were kept 
among the materials of dramatic imagination. 

(9.) Another influence bore on literature. It was 
that given by the stories of the voyagers, who, in the 
new commercial activity of the country, penetrated into 
remote lands, and saw the strange monsters and savages 
which the poets now added to the fairies, dwarfs, and 
giants of the Romances. Before 1579, books had been 
published on the north-west passage. .Frobisher had 
made his voyages, and Drake had started, to return in 
1580, to amaze all England with the story of his sail 
round the world and of the riches of the Spanish Main. 
We may trace everywhere in EHzabethan literature the 
impression made by the wonders told by the sailors and 
captains who explored and fought from the North Pole 
to the Southern Seas. 

(10.) Then there was the freest possible play of lit- 
erary criticism. Every wine- shop in London, every 
room at the university, was filled with the talk of young 
men on any work which was pubHshed and on the manu- 
scripts which were read. Out of this host emerged the 
men of genius. Moreover, far apart from these, there 
were in England now, among all the noise and stir, quiet 
scholars, such as Contarini and Pole had been in Italy, 
followers of Erasmus and Colet, precursors of Bacon, 
who kept the lamp of scholarship burning, and who, 



IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE I05 

when literature became beautiful, nurtured and praised 
it. Nor were the young nobles, who like Surrey had 
been in Italy and had known what was good, less useful 
now. There were many men who, when Shakespeare 
and Spenser came, were able to say — ^^This is good/' 
and who drew the new genius into light. 

(11.) Lastly, we have proof that there was a large 
number of persons writing who did not publish their 
works. It was considered at this time, that to write for 
the public injured a man, and unless he were driven by 
poverty he kept his manuscript by him. But things 
were changed when a great genius like Spenser took the 
world by storm ; when Lyly's Euphiies enchanted court 
society; when a fine gentleman like Sir Philip Sidney 
was known to be a writer. Literature was made the 
fashion, and the disgrace being taken from it, the pro- 
duction became enormous. Manuscripts written and 
laid by were at once sent forth; and when the rush 
began it grew by its own force. Those who had previ- 
ously been kept from writing by its unpopularity now 
took it up eagerly, and those who had written before 
wrote twice as much now. The great improvement also 
in literary quality is also accounted for by this — that 
men strove to equal such work as Sidney's or Spenser's, 
and that a wider and more exacting criticism arose. 
Nor must one omit to say, that owing to this employ- 
ment of life on so vast a number of subjects, and to the 
voyages, and to the new Hteratures searched into, and to 
the heat of theological strife, a multitude of new words 



I06 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

streamed into the language, and enriched the vocabulary 
of imagination. Shakespeare uses 15,000 words. 

6;^. The Later Literature of Elizabeth's Reign, 1579- 
1602, begins with the publication of Lyly's Euphues^ 
1579, and Spenser's Shepheards Calendar^ also in 1579, 
and with the writing of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia and 
his Apology for Poetrie, 15 80-1. It will be best to 
leave the poem of Spenser aside till we come to write 
of the poets. 

The Euphues was the work of John Lyly, poet and 
dramatist. It is in two parts, Euphues the A^iatomie of 
Wit, and Euphues and his England, In six years it ran 
through five editions, so great was its popularity. Its 
prose style is odd to an excess, " precious " and sweet- 
ened, but it has care and charm, and its very faults were 
of use in softening the solemnity and rudeness of previ- 
ous prose. The story is long, and is more a loose frame- 
work into which Lyly could fit his thoughts on love, 
friendship, education, and religion, than a true story. It 
made its mark because it fell in with all the fantastic and 
changeable life of the time. Its far-fetched conceits, its 
extravagance of gallantry, its endless metaphors from the 
classics and especially from natural history, its curious 
and gorgeous descriptions of dress, and its pale imitation 
of chivalry, were all reflected in the hfe and talk and 
dress of the court of Ehzabeth. It became the fashion 
to talk ^^ Euphuism," and, like the Utopia of More, Lyly's 
book has created an English word. 

The Arcadia was the work of Sir Philip Sidney, and 



rv THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 10/ 

though written about 15 So, did not appear till after his 
death. It is more poetic and more careless in style than 
the Eiiphiies^ but it endeavours to get rid of the mere 
quaintness for quaintness' sake, and of the far-fetched 
fancies, of Euphuism. It is less the image of the time 
than of the man. We know that bright and noble figure, 
the friend of Spenser, the lover of Stella, the last of the 
old knights, the poet, the critic, and the Christian, who, 
wounded to the death, gave up the cup of water to a 
dying soldier. We nnd his whole spirit in the story of 
the Arcadia, in the lirst two books and part of the third, 
which alone were written by him. It is a pastoral ro- 
mance, after the fashion of the Spanish romances, col- 
oured by his love of his sister. Lady Pembroke, and by 
the scenery of Wilton under the woods of which he wrote 
it. The characters are real, but the story is confused 
by endless digressions. The sentiment is too tine and 
delicate for the world of action. The descriptions are 
picturesque : a quaint or poetic thought or an epigram 
appear in every line. There is no real art in it, nor is it 
true prose. But it is so full of poetical thought that it 
became a mine into which poets dug for subjects. 

64. Poetic Criticism began before the pubhcation of 
the Faerie Queene, and its rise shows the interest now 
awakened in poetry. The Discourse of English Poetrie, 
1 5 86, written by Wilham Webbe ^-'to stirre up some other 
of meet abihtie to bestow travell on the matter," was 
followed three years after by the Art of English Foesie, 
attributed to George Puttenham, an elaborate book, 



I08 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

"written," he says, "to help the courtiers and the gen- 
tlewomen of the court to write good poetry, that the art 
may become vulgar for all Englishmen's use/' and the 
phrase marks the interest now taken in poetry by the 
highest society in England. Sidney himself joined in 
this critical movement. His Apology for Poet7'ie, the 
style of which is much more like prose than that of his 
Arcadia, defended against Stephen Gosson's School of 
Abuse in which poetry and plays were attacked from the 
Puritan point of view, the nobler uses of poetry. But 
he, with his contemporary, Gabriel Harvey, was so en- 
thralled by the classical traditions that he also defended 
the "unities" and attacked all mixture of tragedy and 
comedy, that is, he supported all that Shakespeare was 
destined to violate. The Defence of Rhyme, written 
much later by Samuel Daniel, and which finally destroyed 
the attempt to bring classical metres into our poetry; 
and also Campion's effort, in his Observations, in favour 
of rhymeless verse, must be mentioned here. Their 
matter belongs to this tim.e. 

65. Later Prose Literature. — (i.) Theological Litera- 
ture remained for some years after 1580 only a literature 
of pamphlets. Puritanism, in its attack on the stage, 
and in the Martin Marprelate controversy upon episcopal 
government in the Church, flooded England with small 
books. Lord Bacon even joined in the latter contro- 
versy, and Nash the dramatist made himself famous in 
the war by the vigour and fierceness of his wit. Period- 
ical writing was, as it were, started on its course. Over 



IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE IO9 

this troubled and multitudinous sea rose at last the 
stately work of Richard Hooker. It was in 1594 that 
the first four books of The Laius of Ecclesiastical Polity, 
a defence of the Church against the Puritans, were given 
to the world. Before his death he finished the other 
four. The book has remained ever since a standard 
work. It is as much moral and political as theological. 
Its style is grave, clear, and often musical. He adorned 
it with the figures of poetry, but h^ used them with 
temperance, and the grand and rolling rhetoric with 
which he often concludes an argument is kept for its 
right place. On the whole, it is the first monument of 
splendid literary prose that we possess. 

(2.) We may place beside it, as other great prose of 
Elizabeth's later time, the development of The Essay in 
Lord Bacon's Essays, 1597, and Ben Jonson's Dis- 
coveries, pubhshed after his death. The highest literary 
merit of Bacon's Essays is their combination of charm 
and of poetic prose with conciseness of expression and 
fulness of thought. But the oratorical and ideal manner 
in which, with his variety, he sometimes wrote, is best 
seen in his New Atlantis, that imaginary land in the 
unreachable seas. 

(3.) 77^6' Literature of Travel was carried on by the 
publication in 1589 of Hakll^'t's Navigation, Voyages, 
and Discoveries of the- English N'ation, The influence of 
a compilation of this kind, containing the great deeds of 
the English on the seas, has been felt ever since in the 
literature of fiction and poetry. 



no ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

(4.) /// tlie Tales, which poured out Hke a flood from 
the ^^ university wits," from such men as Peele, and 
Lodge, and Greene, we find the origin of EngHsh fiction, 
and the subjects of many of our plays ; while the fan- 
tastic desire to revive the practices of chivalry which was 
expressed in the A?radia, found food in the continuous 
translation of romances, chiefly of the Charlemagne 
cycle, but now more from Spain than from France ; and 
in the reading of the Italian poets, Boiardo, Tasso, and 
Ariosto, who supplied a crowd of our books with the 
machinery of magic, and with conventional descriptions 
of nature and of women's beauty. 

66. Edmund Spenser. — The later Ehzabethan poetry 
begins with the Shephea^'ds Calendar of Spenser. 
Spenser was born in London in 1552, and educated at 
the Merchant Taylors' Grammar School, which he left 
for Cambridge in April, 1569. There seems to be evi- 
dence that in this year the Somiets of Petrarca and the 
Visions of Bellay afterwards published in 159 1, were 
written by him for a miscellany of verse and prose issued 
by Van der Noodt, a refugee Flemish physician. At 
sixteen or seventeen, then, he began hterary w^ork. At 
college Gabriel Harvey, a scholar and critic, and the 
Hobbinoll of Spenser's works, and Edward Kirke, the 
E. K. of the Shepheards Calendar, were his friends. In 
1576 he took his degree of M.A., and before he returned 
to London spent some time in the wilds of Lancashire, 
where he fell in love with the " Rosalind " of his poetry, 
a '^ fair widowe's daughter of the glen." His love was 



IV THE ELIZABETHAN LIIERATURE III 

not returned, a rival interfered, but he clung fast until 
his marriage to this early passion. His disappointment 
drove him to the South, and there, 1579, he was made 
known through Leicester to Leicester's nephew, Philip 
Sidney. With him, and perhaps at Penshurst, the Shep- 
heards Calendar was finished for the press, and the 
Faerie Queene conceived. The publication of the for- 
mer work, 1579, made Spenser the first poet of the day, 
and so fresh and musical, and so abundant in new life 
were its twelve eclogues, that men felt that at last Eng- 
land had given birth to a poet as original, and with as 
much metrical art as Chaucer. Each month of the year 
had its own eclogue ; some were concerned with his 
shattered love, two of them were fables, three of them 
satires on the lazy clergy ; one was devoted to fair Eliza's 
praise : one, the Oak and the Briar, prophesies his 
mastery over allegory. The others belong to rustic 
shepherd life. The English of Chaucer is imitated, but 
the work is full of a new spirit, and as Spenser had begun 
with translating Petrarca, so here, in two of the eclogues, 
he imitates Clement ]\Iarot. The ^-'Puritanism" of the 
poem is the same as that of the Faerie Queene which he 
now began to compose. Save in abhorrence of Rome, 
Spenser does not share in the politics of Puritanism. 
Nor does he separate himself from the world. He is as 
much at home in society and with the arts as any literary 
courtier of the day. He was Puritan in his attack on the 
sloth and pomp of the clergy ; but his moral ideal, built 
up, as it w^as, out of Christianity and Platonism, rose far 
above the narrower ideal of Puritanism. 



ri2 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

In the next year, 1580, he went to Ireland with Lord 
Grey of Wilton as secretary, and afterwards saw and 
learnt that condition of things which he described in his 
View of the Present State of Ireland, He was made 
Clerk of Degrees in the Court of Chancery in 1581, and 
Clerk of the Council of Munster in 1586, and it was then 
that the manor and castle of Kilcolman were granted to 
him. Here, at the foot of the Galtees, and bordered to 
the north by the wild country, the scenery of which is 
frequently painted in the Faerie Queene, and in whose 
woods and savage places such adventures constantly took 
place in the service of Elizabeth as are recorded in the 
Faerie Queene, the first three books of that great poem 
were finished. 

67. The Faerie Queene. — The plan of the poem is 
described in Spenser's prefatory letter to Raleigh. The 
twelve books were to tell the warfare of twelve Knights, 
in whom twelve virtues were represented. They are 
sent forth from the court of Gloriana, Queen of Fairy- 
land, and their warfare is against the vices and errors, im- 
personated, which opposed those virtues. In Arthur, the 
Prince, the Magnificence of the whole of virtue is repre- 
sented, and he was at last to unite himself in marriage to 
the Faerie Queene, that divine glory of God to which all 
human act and thought aspired. Six books of this plan 
were finished ; the legends of Holiness, Temperance, and 
Chastity, of Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy. The two 
posthumous cantos on Mutabihty seem to have been part 
of a seventh legend, on Constancy, and their splendid 



IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE II3 

work makes us the more regret that the story of the 
poem being finished is not true. Alongside of the spirit- 
"ual allegory is the historical one, in which Elizabeth is 
Gloriana, and Mary of Scotland Duessa ; and Leicester, 
and at times Sidney, Prince Arthur, and Lord Grey is 
Arthegall, and Raleigh Timias, and PhiHp 11. the Soldan, 
or Grantorto. In the midst, other allegories shp in, re- 
ferring to events of the day, and Ehzabeth becomes 
Belphoebe and Britomart, and Alary is Radegund, and 
Sidney is Calidore, and i\lencon is Braggadochio. At 
least, these are considered probable attributions. The 
dreadful " justice " done in Ireland, by the " iron man/' 
and the wars in Belgium, and Norfolk's conspiracy, and 
the Armada, and the trial of jMary are also shadowed 
forth. 

The allegory is clear in the first two books. After- 
wards it is troubled with digressions, sub-allegories, gene- 
alogies, with anything that Spenser's fancy led him to 
introduce. Stories are dropt and never taken up again, 
and the whole tale is so tangled that it loses the interest 
of narrative. But it retains the interest of exquisite alle- 
gory. It is the poem of the noble powers of the human 
soul strugghng towards union with God, and warring 
against all the forms of evil ; and these powers become 
real personages, whose lives and battles Spenser tells in 
verse so musical and so ghding, so dehcately wrought, so 
rich in imaginative ornament, and so inspired with the 
finer life of beauty, that he has been called the poets' 
Poet. But he is the poet of all men who love poetry. 



114 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Descriptions like those of the House of Pride and the 
Mask of Cupid, and of the Months, are so vivid in form 
and colour, that they have always made subjects for 
artists ; while the allegorical personages are, to the very 
last detail, wrought out by an imagination which de- 
scribes not only the general character, but the special 
characteristics of the Virtues or the Vices, of the Months 
of the year, or of the Rivers of England. In its ideal 
whole, the poem represents the new love of chivalry, 
of classical learning; the delight in mystic theories of 
love and religion, in allegorical schemes, in splendid 
spectacles and pageants, in wild adventure ; the love of 
England, the hatred of Spain, the strange worship of the 
queen, even Spenser's own new love. It takes up and 
uses the popular legends of fairies, dwarfs, and giants, all 
the recovered romance and machinery of the Italian 
epics, and mingles them up with the wild scenery of 
Ireland, with the savages and wonders of the New World. 
Almost the whole spirit of the Renaissance under Eliza- 
beth, except its coarser and baser elements, is in its 
pages. Of anything impure, or ugly, or violent, there 
is no trace. And Spenser adds to all his own sacred 
love of love, his own pre-eminent sense of the loveliness 
of loveliness, walking through the whole of this woven 
world of faerie — 

" With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace." 

The first three books were finished in Ireland, and 
Raleigh listened to them in 1589 at Kilcolman Castle, 



IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE II5 

among the alder shades of the riv^er Mulla that fed the 
lake below the castle. Delighted with the poem, he 
brought Spenser to England, and the queen, the court, 
and the whole of England soon shared in Raleigh's 
delight. It was the first great ideal poem that England 
had produced ; it places him side by side v/ith Milton, 
but on a throne built of wholly different material. It has 
never ceased to make poets, and it will live, as he said 
in his dedication to the queen, ^' with the eternitie of her 
fame." 

6S. Spenser's Minor Poems. — The next year, 1591, 
Spenser, being still in England, collected his smaller 
poems, most of which seem to be early work, and 
published them. x\mong them Mother Hubbei^d's Tale 
is a remarkable satire, somewhat in the manner of 
Chaucer, on society, on the evils of a beggar soldiery, of 
the Church, of the court, and of misgovernment. The 
Ruins of Twie, and still more the Tears of the Muses, 
support the statement that literature was looked on coldly 
previous to 1580. Sidney had died in 1586, and three of 
these poems bemoan his death. The others are of slight 
importance, and the whole collection was entitled Co7n- 
plaints. His Daphnaida seems to have also appeared in 
1 5 91. Returning to Ireland, he gave an account of his 
visit and of the court of Elizabeth in Colin Cloufs come 
Ho77ie again, and at last, after more than a year's pursuit, 
\von, in 1594, his second love for his wife, and found with 
her perfect happiness. A long series of lovely '' Sonnets " 
— the Amoi-etti, records the progress of his wooing ; and 



Il6 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

the Epithalamion, his exultant marriage hymn, is the most 
glorious love-song in the Enghsh tongue. These three 
were published in 1595. At the close of 1595 he brought 
to England in a second visit the last three books of the 
Faerie Queene, The next year he spent in London, and 
published these books, as well as the ProthalaiJiion on 
the marriage of Lord Worcester's daughters, the Hymns 
071 Love and Beauty and on Heavenly Love and Beauty, 
The two first hymns were rapturously written in his 
youth; the two others, now written, and with even 
greater rapture, enshrine that love philosophy of Petrarca 
which makes earthly love a ladder to the love of God. 
The close of his life was sorrowful. In 1598, Tyrone's 
rebellion drove him out of Ireland. Kilcolman was 
sacked and burnt, one of his children perished in the 
flames, and Spenser and his family fled for their lives to 
England. Broken-hearted, poor, but not forgotten, the 
poet died in a London tavern. All his fellows went with 
his body to the grave, where, close by Chaucer, he lies in 
Westminster Abbey. London, '^ his most kindly nurse," 
takes care also of his dust, and England keeps him in 
her love. 

69. Later Elizabethan Poetry : Translations. — There 
are three translators that take literary rank among the 
crowd that carried on the work of the earlier time. Two 
mark the influence of Italy, one the more powerful influ- 
ence of the Greek spirit. Sir John Harington in 159 1 
translated Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Fairfax in 1600 
translated TdiSSo'?> Jerusalem, and his book is ^^ one of the 



IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 11/ 

glories of Elizabeth's reign." But the noblest translation 
is that of Homer's whole work by George Chap^ian, the 
dranaatist, the first part of which appeared in 1598. The 
vivid life and energy of the time, its creative power and 
its force, are expressed in this poem, which is '^ more an 
Elizabethan tale written about Achilles and Ulysses " 
than a translation. The rushing gallop of the long four- 
teen-syllable stanza in which it is written has the fire and 
swiftness of Homer, but it has not his directness or dig- 
nity. Its " inconquerable quaintness " and diffuseness 
are wholly unlike the pure form and hght and measure ol 
Greek work. But it is a distinct poem of such power 
that it will excite and dehght all lovers of poetry, as it 
excited and dehghted Keats. John Florio's Tra7tslatio7t 
of the Essays of Montaigne^ 1603, and North's Plutarch, 
are also, though in prose, to be mentioned here, because 
Shakespeare used the books, and because we must mark 
Montaigne's influence on English literature even before 
his retranslation by Charles Cotton. 

70. The Four Phases of Poetry after 1579. — Spenser 
reflected in his poems the romantic spirit of the English 
Renaissance. The other poetry of Elizabeth's reign 
reflected the whole of English Life. The best way to 
arrange it — omitting as yet the Drama — is in an order 
parallel to the growth of the national life, and the proof 
that it is the best way is, that on the whole such an his- 
torical order is a true chronological order. First, then, 
if we compare England after 1580, as writers have often 
done, to an ardent youth, we shall find in the poetry of 



Il8 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

the first years that followed that date all the elements of 
youth. It is a poetry of love, and romance, and imag- 
ination, — of Romeo and Juliet. Secondly, and later on, 
when Englishmen grew older in feeling, their enthusiasm, 
which had flitted here and there in action and literature 
over all kinds of subjects, settled down into a steady 
enthusiasm for England itself The country entered on 
its early manhood, and parallel with this there is the 
great outbreak of historical plays, and a set of poets whom 
I will call the Patriotic Poets. Thirdly, and later still, 
the fire and strength of the people, becoming inward, 
resulted in a graver and more thoughtful national life, 
and parallel with this are the tragedies of Shakespeare 
and the poets who have been called philosophical. 
These three classes of poets overlapped one another, 
and grew up gradually, but on the whole their succes- 
sion is the image of a real succession of national thought 
and emotion. 

k fourth and separate phase does not represent, as these 
do, a new national life, a new religion, and new politics, 
but the despairing struggle of the old faith against the 
new. There were numbers of men, such as Wordsworth 
has finely sketched in old Norton in the Doe of Ry Is tone, 
who vainly and sorrowfully strove against all the new 
national elements. Robert Southwell, of Norfolk, a 
Jesuit priest, was the poet of Roman Catholic England. 
Imprisoned for three years, racked ten times, and finally 
executed, he wrote, while confessor to Lady Arundel, a 
number of poems published at various intervals, and 



IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE II9 

finally collected under the title, 6'/. Peter's Complaint, 
Mary Magdalen's Tears, with other works of the Author, 
R.S. The MceonicE, and a short prose work Ma^ie Mag- 
dalen's Funerall Tears, became also very popular. It 
marks not only the large Roman Catholic element in the 
country, but also the strange contrasts of the time that 
eleven editions of books with these titles were published 
between 1595 and 1609, at a time when, the Venus and 
Adojiis of Shakespeare led the way for a multitude of 
poems — following on Marlowe's Hero and Leander and 
Lodge's Glaucus and Scylla — which sang devotedly of 
love and amorous joy. 

71. The Love Poetry. — I have called it by this name 
because all its best work is almost limited to that subject 
— the subject of youth. The Love sonnets, written in 
a series, are a feature of the time. The best are Sidney's 
Astrophel and Stella, Daniel's Delia, Constable's Diana, 
Drayton's Idea, Spenser's Amoretti, and Shakespeare's 
Sonnets, More than twelve collections of these love 
sonnets, each dedicated to one lady, and often a hun- 
dred in number, were published between 1593 and 1596, 
and these had been preceded by many others. 

The Miscellanies, to which I have already alluded, 
and the best of which were The Passionate Pilgrim, 
England's Helicon, and Davison's Rhapsody, were 
scarcely Iqss numerous than the Song-books published 
with music, full of delightful lyrics. The wonder is that 
the lyrical level in such a multitude of short poems is 
so high throughout. Some songs reach a first-rate ex- 



I20 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

cellence, but even the least good have the surprising 
spirit of poetry in them. The best of them are *' old 
and plain, and dallying with the innocence of love/^ 
childlike in their natural sweetness and freshness, but 
full also of a southern ardour of passion. Shakespeare's 
excel the others in their gay rejoicing, their firm reality, 
their exquisite ease, and when in the plays, gain a 
new beauty from their fitness to their dramatic place. 
Others possess a quaint pastoralism like shepherd life 
in porcelain, such as Marlowe's well-known song, ^^ Come 
live with me, and be my love ; " others a splendour of 
love and beauty as in Lodge's Song of Rosaline, and 
Spenser's on his marriage. To speciahse the various 
kinds would be too long, for there never was in our 
land a richer outburst of lyrical ravishment and fancy. 
England was like a grove in spring, full of birds in 
revel and solace. Love poems of a longer kind were 
also made, such as Marlowe's Hero a7id Leander, the 
Venus and Ado?iis and, if we may date them here, the 
Elegies of John Donne. I mention only a few of these 
poems, the mark of which is a luscious sensuousness. 
There were also religious poems, the reflection of the 
Puritan and Church elements in Enghsh society. They 
were collected under such titles as the Hand/id of 
Honeysuckles, the Poor Widozv's Mite, Psalms and 
Sonnets, and there are some good things among them 
written by William Hunnis. 

72. The Patriotic Poets. — Among all this poetry of 
Romance, Religion, and Love, rose a poetry which 



tv THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 121 

devoted itself to the glory of England. It was chiefly 
historical, and as it may be said to have had its germ 
in the Almvr for Magistrates, so it had its perfect 
flower in the historical dramas of Shakespeare. Men 
had now begun to have a great pride in England. She 
had stepped into the foremost rank, had outwitted 
France, subdued internal foes, beaten and humbled 
Spain on every sea. Hence the history of the ' land 
became precious, and the very rivers, hills, and plains 
honourable, and to be sung and praised in verse. This 
poetic impulse is best represented in the works of three 
men — Willl-ui Warner, Sa^iuel Daniel, and ^vIichael 
Drwton. Born within a few years of each other, about 
1560, they all lived beyond the century, and the national 
poetry they set on foot lasted when the romantic poetry 
lost its wealth and splendour. 

William Warner's great book was Albion^ s England, 
1586, a history of England in fourteen-syllable verse 
from the Deluge to Queen Ehzabeth. It is clever, 
humorous, now grave, now gay, crowded ^nth stories, 
and runs to 10,000 lines. Its popularity was great, 
and the English in which it was written deser^^ed it. 
Such stories in it as Argentile and Cura?i, and the 
Patient Countess, prove Warner to have had a true, 
pathetic vein of poetry. His English is not however so 
good as that of '^ well-languaged Daniel," who, among 
tragedies and pastoral comedies, the noble series of 
sonnets to Deha and poems of pure fancy, wrote The 
Complaint of Rosamofidf far more poetical than his 



122 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Steadier, even prosaic Civil Wars of York and Lan- 
caster. Spenser saw in him a new '' shepherd of poetry 
who did far surpass the rest/' and Coleridge says that 
the style of his Hymen's Triiunph may be declared 
'•' imperishable English." Of the three the easiest poet 
was Drayton. The Barons'" Wars, England's Hei'oical 
Epistles, 1597, The AIise7'ies of Queefi Margairt, and 
Eour Legends, together with the briUiant Ballad of 
Agincou7't prove his patriotic fervour. Not content with 
these, he set himself to glorify the whole of his land in 
the Polyolbion, thirty books, and nearly 100,000 lines. 
It is a description in Alexandrines of the '' tracts, 
mountains, forests, and other parts of this renowned 
isle of Britain, with intermixture of the most remark- 
able stories, antiquities, wonders, pleasures, and com- 
modities of the same, digested into a poem." It was 
not a success, though it deserved success. Its great 
length was against it, but the real reason was that this 
kind of poetry had had its day. It appeared in 161 3, 
in James I.'s reign. He, as well as Daniel, did other 
work. Indeed Drayton is a striking instance of the way 
in which these divisions, which I have made for the sake 
of a general order, overlapped one another. He is as 
much the love poet as the patriotic poet in his eclogues 
of 1593 and in his later Idea; he is also a religious, a 
satirical, a lyrical, and a fairy poet. He plays on every 
kind of harp. 

73. Philosophical Poets. — Before the date of the 
Polyolbion a change had come. As the patriotic poets 



IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 1 23 

on the whole came after the romantic, so the patriotic, 
on the whole, were followed by the philosophical poets. 
The land was settled ; enterprise ceased to be the first 
thing ; men sat down to think, and in poetry questions 
of religious and political philosophy were treated with 
^^ sententious reasoning, grave, subtle, and condensed." 
Shakespeare, in his passage from comedy to tragedy, in 
1 60 1, illustrates this change. The two poets who best 
represent it are Sir Jxo. Davies and Fulke Greville, 
Lord Brooke. In Davies himself we find an instance of 
it. His earlier poem of the Orchestra, 159^? i^^ which 
the whole world is explained as a dance, is as exultant 
as Spenser. His later poem, 1599, is compact and vig- 
orous reasoning, for the most part without fancy. Its 
very title, Nosce te ipsiim — Know Thyself — and its 
divisions, i. ^^ On humane learning," 2. ^^ The immor- 
tality of the soul" — mark the alteration. Two little 
poems, one of Bacon's, on the Life of Man, as a bubble, 
and one of Sir Henry Wotton's, on the Character of a 
Happy Life, are instances of the same change. It is still 
more marked in Lord Brooke's long, obscure poems Ofi 
Human Learning, on Wars, on Monarchy, and on Relig- 
io7i. They are political and historical treatises, not 
poems, and all in them, said Lamb, ^^ is made frozen 
and rigid by intellect." Apart from poetry, ^^ they are 
worth notice as an indication of that thinking spirit 
on political science which was to produce the riper 
speculations of Hobbes, Harrington, and Locke." 
Brooke too, in a happier mood, was a lyrist ; and his 



124 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

collection, CcBlica, has some of the graces of love and 
its imagination. 

74. Satirical Poetry, which lives best when imaginative 
creation begins to decay, arose also towards the end of 
Elizabeth's reign. It had been touched in the begin- 
ning before Spenser by Gascoigne's Steele Glas, but had 
no further growth save in prose until 1593, when John 
Donne is supposed to have written some of his Satires. 
Thomas Lodge, Joseph Hall, John Marston, wrote satir- 
ical poems in the last part of the sixteenth century. 
These satires are all written in a rugged, broken style, 
supposed to be the proper style for satire. Donne's are 
the best, and are so because he was a true poet. Though 
his work was mostly done in the reign of James I., and 
though his poetical reputation, and his influence (which 
was very great) did not reach their height till after the 
publication in 1633 of all his poems, he really belongs, 
by dint of his youthful sensuousness, of his imaginative 
flame, and of his sad and powerful thought, to the Eliza- 
bethans. So also does William Drummond, of Haw- 
thornden, whose work was done in the reign of James L, 
and whose name is linked by poetry and friendship to 
Sir WilHam Alexander, Earl of Stirling. Both are the 
result of the Elizabethan influence extending to Scotland. 
Drummond's sonnets and madrigals have some of the 
grace of Sidney, and he rose at intervals into grave and 
noble verse, as in his sonnet on John the Baptist. We 
turn now to the drama, which in this age grew into 
magnificence. 



IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 125 

THE DRAMA 

75. Early Dramatic Representation in England. — 

The English Drama grew up through the Mystery and 
the Miracle play, the Morahty and the Interlude, the 
rude farce of the strolHng players and the pageant. 
The Mystery was the representation (at first in or near 
the Church, and by the clergy; and then in the towns, 
and by the laity) of the events of the Old and New 
Testaments which bore on the Fall and the Redemption 
of Man. The Miracle play, though distinct elsewhere 
from the Mystery, was the common name of both in 
England, and was the representation of some legendary 
story of a saint or martyr. These stories gave more 
freedom of speech, a more worldly note, and a greater 
range of characters to the mystery plays. They also 
supplied a larger opportunity for the comic element. The 
Miracle plays of England fell before long into two classes, 
represented at the feasts of Christmas Day and Easter 
Day; and about 1262 the town-guilds took them into 
their hands. At Christmas the Birth of Christ was rep- 
resented, and the events which made it necessary, back 
to the Fall of Man. At Easter the Passion was repre- 
sented in every detail up to the Ascension, and the play 
often began with the raising of Lazarus. Sometimes even 
the Baptism was brought in, and finally, the Last Judg- 
ment was added to the double series, which thus em- 
braced the whole history of man from the creation to the 
close. About the beginning of the fourteenth century 



126 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

these two series were brought together into one, and 
acted on Corpus Christi Day on a great moveable stage 
in the open spaces of the towns. The whole series con- 
sisted of a number of short plays written frequently by 
different authors, and each guild took the play which 
suited it best. In a short time, there was scarcely a 
town of any importance in England from Newcastle to 
Exeter which had not its Corpus Christi play, and the 
representations lasted from one day to eight days. Of 
these sets of plays we possess the Towneley plays, 32 in 
all, those of York, 48 in all, those of Chester, 24 in all, 
and a casual collection, called of Coventry, of later and 
unconnected plays. Of course, these sets only represent 
a small portion of the Miracle plays of England. It is 
not improbable that every little town had its own maker 
of them. Any play that pleased was carried from the 
town to the castle, from the castle, it may be, to the 
court. The castle chaplain sometimes composed them : 
the king kept players of them and scenery for them. 
On the whole this irregular drama lasted, if we take in 
its Anglo-Norman beginnings in French and Latin, for 
nearly 500 years, from mo, when we first hear at St. 
Albans of the Miracle play of St. Catherine, to the reign 
of Henry HI., when TJie Ha^-rowing of Hell, our first 
extant religious drama in English, was acted, and then 
to 1580, when we last hear of the representation of a 
Miracle play at Coventry. 

76. Separate plays preceded and existed alongside 
of these large series. Not only on the days of Christ- 



IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 12/ 

mas, Easter, and Corpus Christi were plays acted, but 
plays were made for separate feasts, saints' days, and 
the turns of the year, and these had the character of 
the counties where they were made. The villages took 
them up, and soon began to ask for secular as well as 
rehgious representations at their fairs and merry-mak- 
ings. The strolling players answered the demand, and 
secular subjects began to be treated with romantic or 
comic aims, and with some closeness to natural life. 
We have a play about Robin Hood of the sixteenth 
century, acted on jNIay Day ; the Play of St. George ; 
the Play of the Wake on St. John's Eve. Some of the 
farcical parts of the Miracle plays, isolated from the 
rest, were acted, and we have a dramatic fragment 
taken from the very secular romance of Dame Siriz, 
which dates from the time of Edward I. We may be 
sure it was not the only one. 

77. The Morality begins as we come to the reign 
of Edward III. We hear of the Play of the Pater- 
noster, and of one of its series, the Play of Laziness, 
But the oldest extant are of the time of Henry VI. 
The Castle of Constancy ; Humanity ; Spirit, Will, and 
Understanding — these titles partly explain what the 
Mo7'ality was. It was a play in which the characters 
were the Vices and Virtues, with the addition after- 
wards of allegorical personages, such as Riches, Good 
Deeds, Confession, Death, and any human condition or 
quaUty needed for the play. These characters were 
brought together in a rough story, at the end of which 



128 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Virtue triumphed, or some moral principle was estab- 
lished. The later dramatic fool grew up in the Moral- 
ities out of a personage called "The Vice," and the 
hum.orous element was introduced by the retaining of 
"The Devil" from the Miracle play and by making 
The Vice torment him. We draw nearer then in the 
Morality to the regular drama. Its story had to be 
invented, a proper plot had to be conceived, a clear 
end fixed upon, to produce which the allegorical char- 
acters acted on one another. We are on the very 
verge of the natural drama; and so close was the 
relation that the acting of Moralities did not die out 
till about the end of EHzabeth's reign. A certain tran- 
sition to the regular drama may be observed in them 
when historical characters, celebrated for a virtue or 
vice, were introduced instead of the virtue or the 
vice, as when Aristides took the place of Justice. 
Moreover, as the heat of the struggle of the Reforma- 
tion increased, the Morality was used to support a side. 
Real men and women were shown under the thin cloaks 
of its allegorical characters. The stage was becoming a 
living power when this began. 

78. The Interludes must next be noticed. There had 
been interludes in the Miracle plays, short, humorous 
pieces, interpolated for the amusement of the people. 
These were continued in the Moralities, and were made 
closer still to popular life. It occurred to John Hey- 
wooD to identify himself with this form of drama, and to 
raise the Interludes into a place in literature. In his 



IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 1 29 

hands, from 1520 to 1540, the Interlude became a kind 
of farce, and he wrote several for the amusement of the 
court of Henry VIII. He drew the characters from real 
life ; in many cases he gave them the names of men and 
women, but he retained ^^ the Vice" as a personage. 

79. The Regular Drama: its First Stage. — These 
were the beginnings of the English Drama. To trace 
the many and various windings of the way from the 
Interludes of Heywood to the regular drama of Elizabeth 
were too long and too involved a work for this book. 
We need only say that the first pure EngUsh comedy 
was Ralph Roister Doister, written by Nicholas Udall, 
master of Eton, known to have been acted before 1551, 
but not pubhshed till 1566. It is our earhest picture of 
London manners ; it is divided into regular acts and 
scenes, and is made in rhyme. The first EngHsh tragedy 
is Gorboduc^ or Fen-ex and Fonrx, written by Sackvalle 
and Norton, and represented in 1561. The story was 
taken from British legend ; the method followed that of 
Seneca. A few tragedies on the same classical model fol- 
lowed, but before long this classical type of plays died out. 

For twenty years or so, from 1560 to 1580, the drama 
was learning its way by experiments. Moralities were 
still made, comedies, tragi-comedies, farces, tragedies ; 
and sometimes tragedy, farce, c.omedy, and morality were 
rolled into one play. The verse of the drama was as 
unsettled as its form. The plays were written in dog- 
gerel, in the fourteen-syllable line, in prose, and in a ten- 
syllable verse, and these were sometimes mixed in the 

K 



130 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

same play. They were acted chiefly at the Universities^ 
the Inns of Court, the Court, and after 1576 by players 
in the theatres. Out of this confusion arose 1580-8 
(i) two sets of dramatic writers, the ^* University Wits" 
and the theatrical playwrights; (2) a distinct dramatic 
verse, the blank verse destined to be used by Marlowe, 
Peele, and Greene ; and (3) the licensed theatre. 

80. The Theatre. — A patent was given in 1574 to 
the Earl of Leicester's servants to act plays in any town 
in England, and they built in 1576 the Blackfriars Thea- 
tre. In the same year two others were set up in the 
fields about Shoreditch — ''The Theatre" and ''The 
Curtain." The Globe Theatre, built for Shakespeare 
and his fellows in 1599, may stand as a type of the rest. 
In the form of a hexagon outside, it was circular within, 
and open to the weather, except above the stage. The 
play began at three o'clock ; the nobles and ladies sat 
in boxes or in stools on the stage, the people stood in 
the pit or yard. The stage itself, strewn with rushes, 
was a naked room, with a blanket for a curtain. Wooden 
imitations of animals, towers, woods, houses, were all the 
scenery used, and a board, stating the place of action, 
was hung out from the top when the scene changed. 
Boys acted the female parts. It was only after the 
Restoration that movable scenery and actresses were 
introduced. No " pencil's aid " supplied the landscape 
of Shakespeare's plays. The forest of Arden, the castle 
of Macbeth, were " seen only by the intellectual eye." 

81. The Second Stage of the Drama ranges from 



IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA . I3I 

1580 to 1596. It includes the plays of Lyly, Peele, 
Greene, Lodge, Marlowe, Kyd, Xash, and the earliest 
works of Shakespeare. During this time we know that 
more than 100 different plays were performed by four 
out of the eleven companies ; so swift and plentiful was 
their production. They were written in prose, and in 
rhyme, and in blank verse mixed with prose and rhyme. 
Prose and rhyme prevailed before 1587, when ^larlowe 
in his play of Tambiirlaine made blank verse so new 
and splendid a thing that it overcame all other dra- 
matic vehicles. John Lvly, however, wrote so much of 
his eight plays in prose, that he estabhshed, we may say, 
the use of prose in the drama — an innovation which 
Gascoigne introduced, and which Shakespeare carried 
to perfection. Some beautiful httle songs scattered 
through Lyly's plays are the forerunners of the songs 
with which Shakespeare and his fellows illumined their 
dramas, and the witty ^^ quips and cranks," repartees 
and similes of Lyly's fantastic prose dialogue were the 
school of Shakespeare's first prose dialogue. Peele, 
Greene^ and ]\L-\rlowe, the three important names of 
the period, belong to the University men. So do Lodge 
and Nash, and perhaps Kyd. They are the first in 
whose hands the play of human passion and action is 
expressed with any true dramatic effect. George 
Peele's A7'raig?i77ient of Paris, 1584, and his David 
and Bethsabe are full of passages of new and delightful 
poetry, and when the poetry is good, his blank verse 
and his heroic couplet are smooth and tender. Robert 



132 ENGLISH LITERATURE CKAF. 

Greene, of whose prose in pamphlet and tale much 
might be said, spent ten years in writing, and died in 
1592. There is little poetry in his plays, but he could 
write a charming song. Kyd's best play is the Spanish 
Tragedy. None of these men had the power of work- 
ing out a play by the development of their " characters " 
to a natural conclusion. They anticipate the poetry, 
but not the art, of Shakespeare. Christopher jMarlowe 
as dramatist surpassed, as poet rose far above, them, 
and as metrist is almost as great as Shakespeare. The 
difference between the unequal action and thought of 
his Doctor Fansti/s, and the quiet and orderly progres- 
sion to its end of the play of Ediuard 11. , is all the more 
remarkable when we know that he died at thirty. As 
he may be said to have made the verse of the drama, so 
he created the English tragic drama. His best plays 
are wrought with a new skill to their end, his characters 
are outhned with strength and developed with fire. 
Each play illustrates one ruling passion, in its growth, 
its power, and its extremes. Tamburlaine paints the 
desire of universal empire ; the Jew of Malta, the mar- 
ried passions of greed and hatred; Doctor FaustuSy the 
struggle and failure of man to possess all knowledge and 
all pleasure without toil and without law ; Edward II., the 
misery of weakness and the agony of a king's ruin. His 
knowledge of human nature was neither extensive nor 
penetrative, but the splendour of his imagination, and 
the noble surging of his verse, make us forget his want 
of depth and of variety. Every one has dwelt on his 



IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 1 33 

intemperance in phrases and of images, but the spirit of 
poetry moves in them ; we even enjoy the natural faults 
of fiery youth in a fiery time. He had no humour, and 
his farcical fun is like the boisterous play of a clumsy 
animal. In nothing is the difference between Shake- 
speare and him and his fellows more infinite than in this 
point of humour. And indeed he had little pathos. 
His sorrows are too loud. Nevertheless, by force of 
poetry, not of dramatic art, Marlowe made a noble 
porch to the temple which Shakespeare built. That tem- 
ple, however, in spite of all the preceding work, seems to 
spring out of nothing, so astonishing it is in art, in 
beauty, in conception. He himself was his only worthy 
predecessor, and the third stage of the dra7?ia includes 
his work, that of Ben Jonson's, and of a few others. It 
is the work, moreover, not of University men who did 
not know the stage, but of men who were not only men 
of genius, but also playwrights who understood what a 
play should be, and how it was to be staged. 

82. William Shakespeare in twenty- eight years made 
the drama represent almost the whole of human life. He 
w^as baptised x\pril 26, 1564, and was the son of a com- 
fortable burgess of Stratford-on-Avon. AVhile he was 
still young his father fell into poverty, and an interrupted 
education left him an inferior scholar. '' He had small 
Latin and less Greek ; " but he had a vast store of EngHsh.-^ 

1 He uses 15,000 words, and he wrote pure English. Out of every 
five verbs, adverbs, and nouns {e.^. in the last act of Othello)^ four are 
Teutonic ; and he is more Teutonic in comedy than in tragedy. 



134 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

However, by dint of genius and by living in a society 
in which every kind of information was attainable, he 
became an accompHshed man. The story told of his 
deer-stealing in Charlecote woods is without proof, but 
it is likely that his youth w^as wild and passionate. At 
nineteen he married Anne Hathaway, more than seven 
years older than himself, and was probably unhappy with 
her. For this reason, or from poverty, or from the driv- 
ing of the genius that led him to the stage, he left Strat- 
ford about 1586-7, and came to London at the age of 
twenty-two years, and falling in with Marlowe, Greene, 
and the rest, became an actor and playwright, and may 
have lived their unrestrained and riotous life for some 
years. It is convenient to divide his work into periods, 
and to state the order in which it is now supposed his 
plays were written. But we must not imagine that the 
periods and the order are really settled. We know some- 
thing, but not all we ought to know, of this matter. 

S^. His First Period. — It is probable that before 
leaving Stratford he had sketched a part at least of his 
Fe/ius and Adojiis, It is full of the country sights and 
sounds, of the ways of birds and animals, such as he saw 
when wandering in Charlecote woods. Its rich and over- 
laden poetry and its warm colouring made him, when it 
was published, 1593, at once the favourite of men like 
Lord Southampton, and lifted him into fame. But before 
that date he had done work for the stage by touching up 
old plays, and writing new ones. We seem to trace his 
" prentice hand " in some dramas of the time, but the 



IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA I35 

first he is usually thought to have fully retouched is Ti- 
tus Androntcus, and some time after the First Fart of 
Hemj VI. Love's Labou?'''s Lost, supposed to be written 
1589 or 1590, the first of his original plays, in which he 
quizzed and excelled the Euphuists in w^it, was followed 
by the involved and rapid farce of the Comedy of Errors, 
Out of these frolics of intellect and action he passed 
into pure poetry in the Midsummer Nighfs D^eam, and 
mingled into fantastic beauty the classic legend, the 
mediaeval fairyland, and the clownish hfe of the English 
mechanic. Italian story laid its charm upon him about 
the same time, and the Two GentleiJien of Ve7'ona pre- 
ceded the southern glow of passion in Romeo and Juliet, 
in which he first reached tragic power. They are said to 
complete, with Love's Labour's Won, afterwards recast as 
All's Well that Ends Well, the love plays of his early 
period. We should read along with them, as belonging 
to the same period, the Rape of Liccrece, a poem finally 
printed in 1594, one year later than the Venus and Ado- 
7iis, which was probably finished, if not wholly written, 
at this passionate time. 

The same poetic succession we have traced in the poets, 
is now found in Shakespeare. The patriotic feeling of 
England, also represented in Marlow^e and Peele, had 
seized on him, and he began his great series of historical 
plays with Richard II, and Richard III, To introduce 
Richard III. or to complete the subject, he recast the 
Second and Third Fa?Is of Henry VI, and ended what 
w^e have called his first period by King John about 1596- 



136 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

84. His Second Period, 1596-1601. — In the Merchant 
of Venice Shakespeare reached entire mastery over his 
art. A mingled woof of tragic and comic threads is 
brought to its highest point of colour when Portia and 
Shylock meet in court. Pure comedy followed in his 
retouch of the old Taming of t/ie Shrew, and all the wit 
of the world mixed with noble history met in the first and 
?>tcond Henry IV., 1597-8; while Falstaffwas continued 
in the Merry Wives of Windsor. The historical plays 
were then closed with Henry V, 1599; a splendid dra- 
matic song to the glory of England. The Globe Theatre 
of which he was one of the proprietors, was built in 1599. 
In the comedies he wrote for it, Shakespeare turned to 
write of love again, not to touch its deeper passion as 
before, but to play with it in all its lighter phases. • The 
flashing dialogue of Much Ado About Nothing was fol- 
lowed by the far-off forest world of As You Like //, 1599, 
where "• the time fleets carelessly," and Rosahnd's char- 
acter is the play. Amid all its gracious lightness steals in 
a new element, and the melancholy of Jaques is the flrst 
touch we have of the older Shakespeare who had " gained 
his experience, and whose experience had made him 
sad." As yet it was but a touch ; Twelfth Night shows 
no trace of it, though the play that followed, AIVs Well 
that Ends Well, 1601? again strikes a sadder note. We 
find this sadness fully grown in the later Sonnets, which 
are said to have been finished about 1602. We know 
that some of the Sonnets existed in 1598, but they were 
all printed together for the first time in 1609. They 



IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 13/ 

form together the most deep, ardent, subtle, and varied 
representation of love in our language, and their emotion 
is mingled with so great a wealth of simple and complex 
thought that they seem to be written out of the experi- 
ence, not of one but of many men. 

Shakespeare's life changed now, and his mind changed 
with it. He had grown wealthy during this period, 
famous, and loved by society. He was the friend of the 
Earls of Southampton and Essex, and of William Herbert, 
Lord Pembroke. The queen patronised him ; all the 
best literary society was his own. He had rescued his 
father from poverty, bought the best house in Stratford 
and much land, and was a man of wealth and comfort. 
Suddenly all his life seems to have grown dark. His 
best friends fell into ruin, Essex perished on the scaifold, 
Southampton went to the Tower, Pembroke was banished 
from the court ; he may himself, some have thought, have 
been slightly involved in the rising of Essex. Added to 
this, we may conjecture, from the imaginative pageantry 
of the sonnets, that he had unwisely loved, and been 
betrayed in his love by a dear friend. Public and pri- 
vate ill then weighed heavily upon him ; he seems to 
even have had disgust for his profession as an actor ; 
and in darkness of spirit, though still clinging to the 
business of the theatre, he passed from comedy to write 
of the sterner side of the world, to tell the tragedy of 
mankind. 

85. His Third Period, 1601-1608, begins with the 
last days of Queen Elizabeth. It opens with Julius 



138 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Ccesai^ and we may have, scattered through the telling 
of the great Roman's fate, the expression of Shake- 
speare's sorrow for the ruin of Essex. Hamlet followed, 
1601-3? for the poet felt, like the Prince of Denmark, 
that '^ the time was out of joint." Hamlet^ the dreamer, 
may well represent Shakespeare as he stood aside from 
the crash that overwhelmed his friends, and thought on 
the changing world. The tragi- comedy of Measure for 
Measinr, 1603 ? may have now^ been written, and is tragic 
in thought throughout. Othello, 1604, Macbeth, Lear, 
Troilus a7id Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolamis, 
1608? Tinion (only in part his own), were all written in 
these five years. The darker sins of men ; the unpitying 
fate which slowly gathers round and falls on mistakes 
and crimes, on ambition, luxury, and pride ; the aveng- 
ing wrath of conscience ; the cruelty and punishment of 
weakness; the treachery, lust, jealousy, ingratitude, mad- 
ness of men ; the follies of the great and the fickleness 
of the mob, are all, with a thousand other varying 
moods and passions, painted, and felt as his own while 
he painted them, during this stern time. 

^6. His Fourth Period, 1608-1613. — As Shakespeare 
wrote of these things he passed out of them, and his last 
days are full of the gentle and loving calm of one who 
has known sin and sorrov/ and fate, but has risen above 
them into peaceful victory. Like his great contemporary 
Bacon, he left the world and his own evil time behind 
him, and with the same quiet dignity sought the inno- 
cence and stillness of country life. The country breathes 



IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 1 39 

through all the dramas of this time. The flowers Perdita 
gathers in Winter's Tale, the frolic of the sheep-shear- 
ing, he may have seen in the Stratford meadows ; the 
song of Fidele in Cyinbeline is written by one who already 
feared no more the frown of the great, nor slander, nor 
censure rash, and was looking forward to the time when 
men should say of him — 

Quiet consummation have ; 
And renowned be thy grave ! 

Shakespeare probably left London in 1609, and lived in 
the house he had bought at Stratford-on-Avon. He was 
reconciled, it is said, to his wife, and the plays now writ- 
ten dwell on domestic peace and forgiveness. The story 
of Marina^ which he left unfinished, and which it is 
supposed two later WTiters expanded into the play of 
Pericles^ is the first of his closing series of dramas. 
Cyjnbeline, 1609? The Te7?ipest, 16 10? Winter's Tale, 
bring his history up to 161 1, and in the next year he 
may have closed his poetic hfe by writing, with Fletcher, 
Hejiry VIII., 1 6 1 2 ? The Two Nolle Kijisnien of Fletcher, 
part of which is attributed to Shakespeare, and in which 
the poet sought the inspiration of Chaucer, would belong 
to this period. For some three years he kept silence, 
and then, on the 23d of April, 1616, it is supposed on 
his fifty-second birthday, he died. 

87. His Work. — We can only guess with regard to 
Shakespeare's life and character. It has been tried to 
find out what he was from his sonnets, and from his plays. 



140 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

but every attempt seems to be a failure. We camiot lay 
our hand on anything and say for certain that it was 
spoken by Shakespeare out of his own personality. He 
created men and women whose dramatic action on each 
other, and towards a chosen end, was intended to please 
the public, not to reveal himself. Frequently failing in 
fineness of workmanship, having, but far less than the 
other dramatists, the faults of the art of his time, he was 
yet in all other points — in creative power, in impassioned 
conception and execution, in truth to universal human 
nature, in intellectual power, in intensity of feeling, in 
the great matter and manner of his poetry, in the weld- 
ing together of thought, passion, and action, in range, in 
plenteousness, in the continuance of his romantic feeling 
— the greatest poet our modern world has known. Like 
the rest of the greater poets, he reflected the noble things 
of his time, but refused to reflect the base. Fully in- 
fluenced, as we see in Hamlet he was, by the graver and 
more philosophic cast of thought of the latter time of 
Elizabeth ; passing on into the reign of James I., when 
pedantry took the place of gaiety, and sensual the place 
of imaginative love in the drama, and artificial art the 
place of that art which itself is nature ; he preserves to 
the last the natural passion, the simple tenderness, the 
sweetness, grace, and fire of the youthful Elizabethan 
poetry. The Winte^^'s Tale is as lovely a love-story as 
Romeo and Jicliet, the Tempest is more instinct with im- 
agination and as great in fancy as the Midsummer Nighfs 
Drea^n^ and yet there are fully twenty years between 



IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA I4I 

them. The only change is m the increase of power and 
in a closer, graver, and more ideal grasp of human nature. 
In the unchangeableness of this joyful and creative art- 
power Shakespeare is almost alone. It is true that in 
these last plays his art is more self-conscious, less natu- 
ral, and the greater glory is therefore lost, but the power 
is not less nor the beauty. 

88. The Decline of the Drama begins while Shake- 
speare is ahve. At first we can scarcely call it decline, 
it w^as so superb in its own qualities. For it began 
with ^^rare Ben Jonson." With him are connected 
by associated work, by quarrels, and by date, Dekker, 
Marston, and Chapman. They belong with Shakespeare 
to the days of Elizabeth and the days of James I. Ben 
Jonson's first play, in its very title. Every Man i?i his 
Humour^ 1596, enables us to say in what the first step 
of this dechne consisted. The drama in Shakespeare's 
hands had been the painting of the whole of human 
nature, the painting of characters as they were built up 
by their natural bent, and by the play of circumstance 
upon them. The drama, in Ben Jonson's hands, was 
the painting of particular phases of human nature, espe- 
cially of his own age ; and his characters are men and 
women as they may become when they are completely 
mastered by a special bias of the mind or Hiunour, 
"The Manners, now^ called Humours, feed the stage," 
says Jonson himself. Every Man m his Humour was 
followed by Every Man out of his Humour, and by 
Cynthia's Revels, written to satirise the courtiers The 



142 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

fierce satire of these plays brought the town down upon 
him, and he replied to their ^^ noise" in the Poetastei', 
in which Dekker and Marston were satirised. Dekker 
answered with the Satiro-Mastix, a bitter parody on 
the Poetaster, in which he did not spare Jonson's bodily 
defects. Silent then for two years, he reappeared with 
the tragedy of Sejanus, and then quickly produced 
three splendid comedies in James I.'s reign, Volpone the 
Fox, the Sikfit Woman, and the Alchemist, 1 605-9-10. 
The first is the finest thing he ever did, as great in 
power as it is in the interest and skill of its plot ; the 
second is chiefly valuable as a picture of EngUsh life 
in high society ; the third is full of Jonson's obscure 
learning, but its character of Sir Epicure Mammon is 
done with Jonson's keenest power. In 161 1 his Catiline 
appeared, and then Bartholomew Fair. Eight years 
after he was made Poet Laureate. Soon he became 
poor and palsy-stricken, but his genius did not decay. 
His tender and imaginative pastoral drama, the Sad 
Shephe7'd, proves that, like Shakespeare, Jonson grew 
gentler as he grew near to death, and death took him 
in 1637. He was a great man. The power and copi- 
ousness of the young Elizabethan age belonged to him ; 
and he stands far below, for he had no passion, but 
still worthily by, Shakespeare, ^^ a robust, surly, and ob- 
serving dramatist." Thos. Dekker, whose lovely lyrics 
are well known, and whose copious prose occupies five 
volumes, ^Miad poetry enough," Lamb said, ^^ for any- 
thing." His Hght comedies of manners are excellent 



IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA I43 

pictures of the time. But his romantic poetry is better 
felt in such dramas as Patie?it G?issil, Old Fortunatus, 
and The Witch of Edino^iton, in which, though others 
worked them along with Dekker, the women are aU his 
own by tenderness, grace, subtlety, and pathos. John 
Marston, whose chief plays were written between 1602 
and 1605, needs httle notice here. He is best known 
by certain noble and beautiful passages, and his finest 
plays were Anto?iio and Mellida and the Malco?ite?it. 
Of the three Geo. Chapman was the most various genius, 
and the most powerful. He illuminated the age of 
Elizabeth by the first part of his translation of Homer ; 
he lived on into the reign of Charles I. His poems 
(of which the best are his continuation of ^larlowe's 
Hero and Leande)', and The Tears of Peace) are ex- 
treme examples of the gnarled, sensuous, formless, and 
obscure poetry of which Dryden cured our literature. 
His plays are of a finer quahty, especially the five 
tragedies taken from French history. They are weighty 
with thought, but the thought devours their action, and 
they are difficult and sensational. Inequality pervades 
them. His mingling of intellectual violence with intel- 
lectual imagination, of obscurity with a noble exultation 
and clearness of poetry, is a strange compound of the 
earher and later Elizabethans. He, like ]\Iarlowe, but 
with less of beauty, " hurled instructive fire about the 
world." With these three I may mention Cyril Tourneur 
and John Day, the one as ferocious in the Atheists ^Vag- 
edy 2is the other was graceful in his Pa r/ia men t of Bees. 



144 ENGLISH LITERATURE CftAP. 

Both were poets, and both were more truly Elizabethan 
than Beaumont, Fletcher, or Webster. 

89. Masques. — Rugged as Jonson was, he could turn 
to light and graceful work, and it is with his name that 
we connect the Masques. He wrote them delightfully. 
Masques were dramatic representations made for a fes- 
tive occasion, with a reference to the persons present 
and the occasion. Their personages were allegorical. 
They admitted of dialogue, music, singing, and dancing, 
combined by the use of some ingenious fable into a 
whole. They were made and performed for the court 
and the houses of the nobles, and the scenery w^as as 
gorgeous and varied as the scenery of the playhouse 
proper was poor and unchanging. Arriving for the first 
time at any repute in Henry VIII. 's time, they reached 
splendour under James and Charles I. Great men took 
part in them. When Ben Jonson wrote them, Inigo 
Jones made the scenery and Lawes the music ; and 
Lord Bacon, Whitelock, and Selden sat in committee 
for the last great masque presented to Charles. Milton 
himself made them worthier by writing Co??ms, and their 
scenic decoration was soon introduced into the regular 
theatres. 

90. Beaumont and Fletcher worked together, and be- 
long not only in date, but in spirit, to the reign of James. 
In two plays, Hen^j VIII. and The Two Noble Ki?isjne?i, 
Fletcher has been linked to Shakespeare. With Beau- 
mont as fellow-worker and counsellor, he wrote about 
a third of the more than fifty plays which go under 



IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 145 

their names. Beaumont died, aged thirty, in 1616, 
Fletcher, aged fifty, in 1625. The creative power of 
the EUzabethan time has no more striking example 
than in their vast production. The inventiveness of 
the plays is astonishing, and their plots are almost 
always easily connected and well supported. Far the 
greater part of the work was done by Fletcher, but it 
has been tried to trace Beaumont's hand chiefly in such 
fine tragedies as T/ie MaicVs Tragedy and Philaster, 
In comedy Fletcher is gay, and quick, and interesting. 
In tragedy and comedy alike, his level of goodness is 
equal, but then we have none of those magnificent out- 
bursts of imaginative passion to which, up to this time, 
we have been accustomed. The Faitliful Shephei'dess 
of Fletcher is a lovely pastoral, and the lyrics which 
diversify his plays have even some of the charm of 
Shakespeare. 

He and his fellows represent a distinct change, and 
not for the better, in the drama — a kind of foujih 
stage. Its poetry is on the whole less masculine. Its 
blank verse is rendered smoother and sweeter by the 
incessant addition of an eleventh syllable, but it is also 
enfeebled. This weak ending, by the additional free- 
dom and elasticity it gave to the verse, was suited to 
the rapid dialogue of comedy, but the dignity of trag- 
edy was lowered by it. The change is also seen in 
other matters. In the previous plays moral justice is 
done. The good are divided from the bad. Fletcher 
seems quite indifferent to this. In the previous plays, 

L 



146 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

men and women, save in Shakespeare, are coarse and 
foul enough at times, but they are so by nature or 
under furious passion. In Fletcher, there is a natural 
indecency, an every-day foulness of thought, which be- 
longs to the good and the bad alike. The women are, 
when good, beyond nature, and, when bad, below it. 
The situations invented tend to be studiously out of the 
way, beyond the natural aspects of humanity. The aim 
of art has changed for the worse. It strives for the 
strange and the sensational. Even John Webster lost 
some of the power his genius gave him by the ghastly 
situations he chose to dwell upon. Yet he all but re- 
deemed the worst of them by the intensity of his imag- 
ination, and by the soul-piercing power with which, in 
a few words, he sounds the depths of the human heart 
when it is wrought by remorse, by sorrow, by fear, or 
by wrath to its greatest point of passion. Moreover, 
in his worst characters there is some redeeming touch, 
and this poetic pity saves his sensationaUsm from weari- 
ness, and brings him nearer to Shakespeare than others 
of his time. His two greatest plays, things which will 
be glorious forever in poetry, are The Duchess of 
Malfi, acted in 161 6, and the White Devil, Vittoria 
Corrombona, printed in 161 2. One other play of the 
time is held to approach them in poetic quaUty, The 
Changeling, by Thomas Middleton, but it does so only 
in parts. 

9 1 . Decay of the Drama. — In the next dramatists, in 
the followers, if I may thus class them, of Massinger 



IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 14/ 

and Ford, the change for the worse in the drama is 
more marked than in the work of those of whom we 
have been speaking. The poetic and creative quahties 
are both less, the sensationalism is greater, the foulness 
of language increases, the situations are more out of 
nature, the verse is clumsier and more careless, the 
composition and connexion of the plots are tumbled 
and confused. But these statements are only moder- 
ately true of iVIassinger and Ford. They stand at the 
head of the rapid decay of the drama, but they still 
retain a predominant part of that which made the 
Elizabethans great. Massinger's first dated play was 
the Virgin Ma^'tyr, 1620. He lived poor, and died 
*^ a stranger," in 1639. In these twenty years he wrote 
thirty-seven plays, of which the New Way to Fay Old 
Debts is the best known by its character of Sir Giles 
Overreach. His versification and language are flexible 
and strong, ^^and seem to rise out of the passions he 
describes." He speaks the tongue of real life. He is 
greater than he seems to be. Like Fletcher, there is 
a steady equality in his work. Coarse, even foul as he 
is in speech, he is the most moral of the secondary 
dramatists. Nowhere is his work so forcible as when 
he represents the brave man struggling through trial to 
victory, the pure woman suffering for the sake of truth 
and love ; or when he describes the terrors that con- 
science brings on injustice and cruelty. John Ford, 
his contemporary, published his first play, the Lover's 
Me lane holy y in 1629, and five years after, Perkin War- 



148 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

beck, one of the best historical dramas after Shake- 
speare. Between these dates appeared others, of which 
the best are the Brokeji Hea?'t and 'Tis Pity She's a 
Whore. He carried to an extreme the tendency of the 
drama to unnatural and horrible subjects, but he did so 
with great power. He has no comic humour, but few 
men have described better the worn and tortured hu- 
man heart. A crowd of dramatists carried on the pro- 
duction of plays till the Commonwealth. Some names 
alone we can mention here — Thomas Heywood, Henry 
Glapthorne, Richard Broome, William Rowley, Thomas 
Randolph, Nabbes, and Davenport. Of these ^^ all of 
whom/* says Lamb, '' spoke nearly the same language, 
and had a set of moral feehngs and notions in com- 
mon," James Shirley is the best and last. He lived 
till 1666. In him the fire and passion of the old time 
pass away, but some of the delicate poetry remains, and 
in him the Elizabethan drama dies. Sir John Suckling 
and Davenant, who wrote plays before the Common- 
wealth, can scarcely be called even decadent Eliza- 
bethans. In 1642 the theatres were closed during the 
calamitous times of the Civil War. Strolling players 
managed to exist with difficulty, and against the law, 
till 1656, when Sir William Davenant had his opera 
of the Siege of Rhodes acted in London. It was the 
beginning of a new drama, in every point but impurity 
different from the old, and four years after, at the Res- 
toration, it broke loose from the prison of Puritanism to 
indulge in a shameless license. 



IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA I49 

In this rapid sketch of the drama in England we 
have been carried on beyond the death of Elizabeth 
to the date of the Restoration. It was necessary, be- 
cause it keeps the whole story together. We now re- 
turn to the time that followed the accession of James I. 



150 ENGLISH LITERATURE 



CHAPTER V 

FROM Elizabeth's death to the restoration, 
1603-1660 

92. The Literature of this Period may fairly be 
called Elizabethan, but not so altogether. The prose 
retained the manner of the Elizabethan time and the 
faults of its style, but gradually grew into greater ex- 
cellence, spread itself over larger fields of thought, and 
took up a greater variety of subjects. The poetry, on 
the whole, dechned. It exaggerated the vices of the 
Elizabethan art, and lessened its virtues. But this is 
not the whole account of the matter. We must add 
that a new prose, of greater force of thought and of a 
simpler style than the EHzabethan, arose in the writings 
of a theologian like ChilHngworth, an historian like 
Clarendon, and a philosopher like Hobbes : and that 
a new type of poetry, distinct from the poetry of fan- 
tastic wit into which Elizabethan poetry had descended, 
was written by some of the lyrical writers. It was Eliza- 
bethan in its lyric note, but it was not obscure. It had 
grace, simplicity, and smoothness. In its greater art and 
clearness it tells us that the critical school is at hand. 



V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 151 

93. Prose Literature. James I. — The greatest prose 
triumph of this time was the Authorised Version of the 
Bible. There is no need to dwell on it, nor on all it has 
done for the literature of England. It lives in almost 
every book of worth and imagination, and its style, es- 
pecially when the subject soars, is inspired by the spirits 
of fitness and beauty and melody. Philosophy passed 
from Elizabeth into the reign of James I. with Francis 
Bacon. The splendour of the form and of the English 
prose of the Advancement of Lear?iing, two books of 
which were published in 1605, raises it into the realm 
of pure literature. It was expanded into nine Latin 
books in 1623, and with the Novum Organon, finished 
in 1620, and the Histo7'ia Naturalis et Experi?nentalis, 
1622, formed the Insiau ratio Magna. The impulse 
these books gave to research, and to the true method 
of research, awoke scientific inquiry in England ; and 
before the Royal Society was constituted in the reign of 
Charles II., our science, though far behind that of the 
Continent, had done some good work. William Harvey 
lectured on the circulation of the blood in 16 15, and 
during the Civil War and the Commonwealth men like 
Robert Boyle, the chemist, John Wallis, the mathe- 
matician, and others, met in William Betty's rooms at 
Brazenose, and prepared the w^ay for Newton. 

94. History, except in the publication of the earHer 
Chronicles of i\rchbishop Parker, does not appear in 
the later part of Elizabeth's reign, but under James I. 
Camden, Spelman, Selden, and Speed continued the anti- 



152 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

quarian researches of Stow and Grafton. Bacon wrote 
a dignified History of Henry VH., and Daniel the poet, 
in his History of E 71 gland to the Time of Edward HI., 
16 13-18, was one of the first to tlirow history into such a 
literary form as to make it popular. Knolles's History 
of the Turks, 1603, and Sir Walter Raleigh's vast 
sketch of the History of the World, show how for the 
first time history spread itself beyond English interests. 
Raleigh's book, written in the peaceful evening of a 
stormy life, and in the quiet of his prison, is not only 
literary from the impulsive passages which adorn it, but 
from its still spirit of melancholy thought. In 16 14, 
John Seidell's Titles of Honour added to the accurate 
work he had done in Latin on the Enghsh Records, 
and his History of Tithes was written with the same 
careful regard for truth in 1618. 

95 . Miscellaneous Literature. — The pleasure of Travel, 
still lingering among us from Elizabeth's reign, found a 
quaint voice in Thomas Coryat's C^'udities, which, in 
161 1, describes his journey through France and Italy; 
and in George Sandys' book, 16 15, which tells his 
journey in the East; while Henry Wotton's Letters from 
Italy are pleasant reading. The care with which Samuel 
Purchas embodied (1613) in Purchas his Pilgrimage 
(" his own in matter, though borrowed ") and in Hak- 
luyfs Posthumus, or Pu7rhas his Pilgri?nes (1625), the 
great deeds, sea voyages, and land travels of adventurers, 
brings us back to the time when England went out to 
win the world. The painting of short " Characters " 



V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 1 5 3 

was begun by Sir Thomas Overbury's book in 16 14, and 
carried on in the following reign by John Earle and 
Joseph Hall, who became bishops. This kind of litera- 
ture marks the interest in individual Hfe which now began 
to arise, and w^hich soon took form in Biography. 

96. In the Caroline Period and the Commonwealth, 
Prose grew into a nearer approach to the finished in- 
strument it became after the Restoration. History was 
illuminated, and its style dignified, by the w^ork of Claren- 
don — the History of the Rebellion (begun in 1641) and 
his owm Life. Thomas jNIay wTOte the History of the 
Parliament of 1640, a book wdth a purpose. Thomas 
Fuller's Church History of Britain, 1656, may in style 
and temper be put alongside of his Worthies of En gland 
in 1662. 

In Theolog}^ and Philosophy the masters of prose at 
this time were Jeremy Taylor and Thomas Hobbes. It 
is a comfort amidst the noisy w^ar of party to breathe the 
calm spiritual air of The Great Exemplar and the Holy 
Livi?ig and Dying w^hich Taylor published at the close 
of the reign of Charles I. They had been preceded in 
1647 t)y the Liberty of Prophesying, in which, agreeing 
with his contemporaries, John Hales and WilUam Chil- 
lingworth, he pleaded the cause of religious toleration, 
and of rightness of life as more important than correct 
theology. Taylor w^as the most eloquent of men, and 
the most facile of orators. Laden with thought, his 
books are read for their sweet and deep devotion (a 
quality which also belonged to his fellow-writer, Lancelot 



154 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Andrewes), even more than for their hnpassioned and 
convoluted outbreaks of beautiful words. On the Puritan 
side, the fine sermons of Richard Sibbes converted Rich- 
ard Baxter, whose manifold literary work only ended in 
the reign of James 11. One little thing of his, written 
at the close of the Civil War, became a household book 
in England. There used to be few cottages which did 
not possess a copy of the Sai?its' Everlasting Rest. The 
best work of Hobbes belonged to Charles I. and the 
Commonwealth, but will better be noticed hereafter. 
The other great prose writer is one of a number of 
men whose productions may be classed under the title 
of Miscellaneous Literature. He is Sir Thomas Browne, 
who, born in 1605, died in 1682. In 1642 his Religio 
Medici was printed, and the book ran over Europe. 
The Enqinry iiito Vulgar Errors followed in 1646, and 
the Hydriotaphia, or Urn-Burial, in 1658. These books, 
with other happy things of his, have by their quaintness, 
their fancy, and their special charm always pleased the 
world, and often kindled weary prose into fresh produc- 
tion. We may class with them Robert Burton's Anatomy 
of Melancholy, a book of inventive wit and scattered learn- 
ing, and Thomas Fuller's Holy and Profane State and 
Worthies of England, in which gaiety and piety, good 
sense and whimsical fancy meet. This kind of writing 
was greatly increased by the setting up of libraries, 
where men dipped into every kind of literature. It 
was in James I.'s reign that Sir Thomas Bodley estab- 
hshed the Bodleian at Oxford, and Sir Robert Cotton 



ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 



^:).^ 



a library now in the British ^^luseum. A number of 
writers took part in the Puritan and Church contro- 
versies, among whom for graphic force Wilham Prynne 
stands out clearly. But the great controversialist was 
]^Iilton. His prose is still, under the Commonwealth, 
Elizabethan in style. It has the fire and violence, the 
eloquence and diftuseness of the earlier literature, but in 
spite of the praise its style has received, it can in reality 
be scarcely cahed a style. It has all the faults a prose 
style can have except obscurity and the commonplace. 
Its magnificent storms of eloquence ought to be in 
poetry, and it never charms, though it amazes, except 
when Milton becomes purposely simple in personal 
narrative. It has no humour, but it has almost unex- 
ampled individuality and ferocity. Among this tem- 
pestuous pamphleteering one pamphlet is almost singular 
in its masterly and uplifted thought, and the style only 
rarely loses its dignity. This is the Areopayitica. In 
pleasant contrast to these controversies arises the gentle 
literature of Izaak Walton's Compleat AnyJer, i(i^i, a 
book which resembles in its quaint and garrulous style 
the rustic scenery and prattling rivers that it celebrates, 
and marks the quiet interest in country life which had 
now arisen in England. Prose, then, in the time of 
James and Charles I., and of the Commonwealth, had 
largely developed its powers. 

97. The Poetry of the Reign of James I. — It is said 
that during this reign and the following one. poetry 
declined. On the whole that is true, but it is true with 



156 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

many modifications. We must remember that Shake- 
speare and many of the EHzabethan poets, like Drayton 
and Daniel, did their finest work in the reign of James I. 
Yet there was decline. The various elements which we 
have noticed in the poetry of Elizabeth's reign, without 
the exception even of the shght Catholic element, though 
opposed to each other, were filled with one spirit — the 
love of England and the queen. Nor were they ever 
sharply divided ; they are found interwoven, and modi- 
fying one another in the same poet, as for instance Puri- 
tanism and Chivalry in Spenser, Catholicism and Love in 
Constable : and all are mixed together in Shakespeare 
and the dramatists. This unity of spirit in poetry 
became less and less after the queen's death. The ele- 
ments remained, but they were separated. The cause of 
this was that the strife in politics between the Divine 
Right of Kings and Liberty, and in rehgion between the 
Church and the Puritans, grew so defined and intense 
that England ceased to be at one, and the poets repre- 
sented the parties, not the whole, of England. Then, 
too, that general passion and hfe which inflamed every- 
thing Elizabethan lessened, and as it lessened, the faults 
of the Elizabethan work became more prominent ; they 
were even supposed to be excellences. Hence the fan- 
tastic, far-fetched, involved style, which was derived from 
the Euphues and the Arcadia, grew into favour and was 
developed in verse, till it ended by greatly injuring good 
sense and clearness in English poetry. In the reaction 
from this the critical and classical school began. Again, 



V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 1 5/ 

when passion lessens, original work lessens, and imitation 
begins. The reign of James is marked by a class of 
poets who imitated Spenser. Giles Fletcher in his 
Chris fs Victo?y and Triiunph, 1610, owned Spenser as 
his master. So did his brother Phineas Fletcher, whose 
Purple Islayid^ an allegory of the human body, 1633, ^^^ 
both grace and sweetness. We may not say that AVill- 
iam Browne imitated, but only that he was influenced 
by Spenser. His Britannia's Pastorals in two parts, 
1 6 13-16, followed by the seven eclogues of the 5/z^///^;'^j' 
Pipe^ are an example in true poetr}^ of the ever-recurring 
element in English poetry, pleasure in country life and 
scenery, which from this time forth grew through Milton, 
Wither, ^vlarvell, and then, after an apparent death, through 
Thomson, Gray, and CoUins, into its wonderful flower in 
our own century. These, if we include the poetry of the 
Dramatists, especially the Underwoods of Ben Jonson, 
and the poems already mentioned of Drummond and 
Stirling, are the poets of the reign of James I. They 
link back to Elizabeth's time and its temper, and it may 
be said of them that they have no special turn, save that 
which arises from their own individuahty. That cannot 
be said of the poets of Charles L's reign, even though 
they may be classed as writing under the influence of 
Ben Jonson and of Donne. 

98. The Caroline Poets, as they are called, are love 
poets or religious poets. Often, as in the case of Herrick 
and Crashaw, they combined both kinds into a single 
volume. Sometimes they were only religious like Her- 



158 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

bert, sometimes only love poets like Lovelace and Suck- 
ling. But whatever they were, they w^ere as individual as 
Botticelh, with whose position and whose contemporaries 
in painting they may, with much justice, be compared. 
The greatest of these w^as Robert Herrick. The gay 
and glancing charm of The Hesperides, 1648, in w^hich 
Horace and Tibullus seem to mingle ; their peculiar art 
which never misses its aim, nor fails in exquisite execution ; 
the almost equal power of The Noble Numbei^s^ pubHshed 
along with the Hesperides, in which the spiritual side of 
Herrick's nature expressed itself, make him, within his 
self-chosen and limited range, the most remarkable of 
those who at this time sat below the mountain top on 
which Milton was alone. Close beside him, but more 
unequal, was Thomas Care\v, whose lyrical poems, well 
known as they are, do not prevent our pleasure in his 
graver work like the Elegy o?t Donne. Greater in im- 
agination, but more unequal still, w^as Richard Crashaw. 
One of his poems, The Flanmig Heart, expresses in its 
name his religious nature and his art. He does not 
burn with a steady fire, he flames to heaven ; and when 
he does, he is divine in music and in passion. At other 
times he is one of the worst of the fantasticals, of those 
lovers of the quaint for quaintness' sake, among whom the 
exclusively religious poets of the time are sadly to be 
classed. There is George Herbert, whose Temple, 
1 63 1, is, by the purity and devotion of its poems, dear 
to all. It is his quiet religion, his quaint, contemplative, 
vicarage-garden note of thought and scholarship which 



V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 1 59 

pleases most, and will always please, the calm piety of 
England. He also is indi\ddual, and so is Henry 
Vaugh-IN, whose S j.c red Poems ^ 1 651, unequal as a whole, 
love nature dearly, and leap sometimes into a higher air 
of poetry than Herbert could attain ; ^^ transcend our 
wonted themes, and into glory peep." Nor must we 
forget William Habington, who mingled his devotion to 
Roman CathoUcism with the praises of his wife under the 
name of Casta ra, 1634 : nor George Wither, who sent 
forth, just before the Civil War began, when he left the 
king for the Parliament, his Hallelujah, 1641, a noble 
series of rehgious poems ; nor Fr-ANCis Quarles, whose 
Divine Emblems, 1635, ^^ ^^'^ ^^^^ ^^ ^^^ cottages of 
England. These poets, with Henry ^lore, the Platonist, 
and Joseph Beaumont, the friend of Crashaw and the 
rival of }^lore, are far below (Wither's work being ex- 
cepted) both Herbert and Vaughan, and bring to an end 
the religious poetry of this curious transition time. I 
have omitted some poems of Cowley and of Edmund 
Waller, which appeared during the Commonwealth, be- 
cause both these poets belong to a new class of poetry, 
the classical poetry of the Restoration. Between this 
new kind of poetr}-, which rose to full power in Dryden. 
and the dying poetry of the transition, stands alone the 
majestic work of a great genius who touches the great 
Elizabethan time with one hand and our own time with 
the other. But before we speak of Milton, a word must 
be said of the lyrics. 

99. The Songs and other Lyrical Poetry. — All through 



l6o ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

the period between James I. and the Restoration, Song- 
writing went on, and was more natural and less ^^ meta- 
physical " than the other forms of poetry. The elements 
of decay attacked it slowly ; those of brightness and pas- 
sion, nature and gaiety, continued to live in it. Moreover, 
the time was remarkable for no small number of lyrical 
poems, other than songs, of a strange loveliness, in which 
the Elizabethan excellences were enhanced by a special, 
particular grace, due partly to the more isolated Kfe some 
of the poets led, and partly to the growth among them of 
a more artistic method. 

With regard to the Songs, a distinct set of them, on the 
most various subjects, are to be found in the Dramatists, 
from Ben Jonson to Shirley. Another set has been 
collected out of the many Song-books which appeared 
with music and words. Many arose in the court of 
Charles I. and among the Royalists in the country, — 
Cavalier songs— -on love, on constancy, on. dress, on 
fleeting fancies of every kind. Others were on battle and 
death for the king ; and a few, sterner and more ideal, 
on the Puritan side. The same power of song- writing 
went on for a brief time after the Restoration, but finally 
perished in the political ballad which was sung about the 
streets by the political parties of the Revolution. Then 
the song-lyric of love was almost silent till the days of 
Burns. 

With regard to the Lyrical poems, it is impossible to 
mention all that are worthy, but an age which produced 
the masques, the poems, and the Sad Shephe7'd of Ben 



V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION l6l 

Jonson; which heard the lyrical measures of Fletcher's 
Faithful Shepherdess ; which read with joy Herrick's 
Corinna and his country lyrics ; which wished, while it 
had its dehght in Wither's PhUarete^ that it was not so 
long j which felt a finer thrill than usual of the imagina- 
tion in Man^ell's Emigrants in the Bernmdas and The 
Thoughts in a Garden ; which was caught, as it were into 
another world, by the Allegro, the Penseroso, the songs 
in Comus and the Abrades, and by the Lycidas of jNIilton 
— can scarcely be called an age of decay. There was 
decline, on the whole. We feel \vhat had passed away 
when we come to the days of the Restoration. But the 
Elizabethan lyrical day died in a lovely sunset. And as 
if to make this clear, we meet with ]\Iilton who bore the 
passion, the force, and the beauty of the past along with 
his own grandeur into the age of Dry den. 

100. John Milton was the last of the Elizabethans, and, 
except Shakespeare, far the greatest of them all. Born in 
1608, in Bread Street (close by the Mermaid Tavern), he 
may have seen Shakespeare, for he remained till he was 
sixteen in London. His literary life may be said to begin 
with his entrance into Cambridge, in 1625, the year of the 
accession of Charles I. Nicknamed the '' Lady of Christ's " 
from his beauty, dehcate taste, and moral life, he soon 
attained a reputation by his Latin poems and discourses, 
and by his English poems which revealed as clear and 
original a genius as that of Chaucer and Spenser. Of 
Milton even more than of the two others, it may be said 
that he was ^Svhole in himself, and owed to none." The 



1 62 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Ode to the Nativity, 1629, the third poem he composed, 
while it went back to the EHzabethan age in beauty, in 
instinctive fire, went forward into a new world of art, the 
world where the architecture of the lyric is finished with 
majesty and music. The next year heard the noble 
sounding strains of At a Solemn Music ; and the sonnet. 
On Attaining the Age of Twenty-three, reveals in dignified 
beauty that intense personality which lives, like a force, 
through every line he wrote. He left the university in 
1632, and went to live at Horton, near Windsor, where 
he spent ^y^ years, steadily reading the Greek and Latin 
writers, and amusing himself with mathematics and music. 
Poetry was not neglected. The Allegro and Penseroso 
were written in 1633 and probably the Arcades ; Comus 
was acted in 1634, and Lycidas composed in 1637. 
They prove that though Milton was Puritan in heart his 
Puritanism was of that earlier type which disdained 
neither the arts nor letters. But they represent a grow- 
ing revolt from the Court and the Church. The Pen- 
seroso prefers the contemplative Hfe to the mirthful, and 
Co7nus, though a masque, rose into a celestial poem to 
the glory of temperance, and under its allegory attacked 
the Court. Three years later, Lycidas interrupts its ex- 
quisite stream of poetry with a fierce and resolute onset 
on the greedy shepherds of the Church. Milton had 
taken his Presbyterian bent. 

In 1638 he went to Italy, the second home of so many 
of the Enghsh poets, visited Florence where he saw 
Galileo, and then passed on to Rome. At Naples he 



V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 163 

heard the sad news of civil war^ which determined him 
to return ; '^ inasmuch as I thought it base to be travel- 
hng at my ease for amusement, while my fellow-country- 
men at home were fighting for liberty." At the meeting 
of the Long Parliament we hnd him in a house in Alders- 
gate, where he lived till 1645. He had projected while 
abroad a great epic poem on the subject of Arthur, but 
in London his mind changed, and among a number of 
subjects, tended at last to Paradise Lost, which he meant 
to throw into the form of a Greek Tragedy with lyrics 
and choruses. 

1 01. Milton's Prose. The Commonwealth. — Suddenly 
his whole hfe changed, and for twenty years — 1640-60 
— he was carried out of art into politics, out of poetry 
into prose. ]\Iost of the Sonnets, however, belong to 
this time. Stately, rugged, or graceful, as he pleased to 
make them, some with the solemn grandeur of Hebrew 
psalms, others having the classic ease of Horace, some 
of his own grave tenderness, they are true, unhke those 
of Shakespeare and Spenser, to the correct form of this 
difficult kind of poetry. But they were ah he could now 
do of his true work. Before the Civil War began in 
1642, he had written five ^igorous pamphlets against 
Episcopacy. Six more pamphlets appeared in the next 
two years. One of these was the Areopagitica ; or^ 
Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, 1644, a 
bold and eloquent attack on the censorship of the press 
by the Presbyterians. Anotlier, remarkable, like the 
Areopagitica^ for its finer prose, was a tract On Educa- 



164 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

iio7i. The four pamphlets in which he advocated con- 
ditional divorce made him still more the horror of the 
Presbyterians. In 1646 he pubhshed his poems, and in 
that year the sonnet On the Forcei^s of Conscience shows 
that he had wholly ceased to be Presbyterian. His 
political pamphlets begin when his Tenure of Kings and 
Magistrates defended in 1649 ^^ execution of the king. 
The Eikonoclastes answered the Eikon Basilike (a portrait- 
ure of the sufferings of the king) ; and his famous Latin 
Defence f 07' the People of England, 1651, replied to Sal- 
masius's Defence of Charles /., and inflicted so pitiless a 
lashing on the great Ley den scholar that Milton's fame 
went over the whole of Europe. In the next year he 
wholly lost his sight. But he continued his work (being 
Latin secretary since 1649) when Cromwell was made 
Protector, and wrote another Defence for the English 
People^ 1654, and a further Defence of Himself against 
scurrilous charges. This closed the controversy in 1655. 
In the last year of the Protector's hfe he began the 
Paradise Lost, but the death of Cromwell threw him 
back into politics, and three more pamphlets on the 
questions of a Free Church and a Free Commonwealth 
were useless to prevent the Restoration. It was a won- 
der he was not put to death in 1660, and he was in hid- 
ing and also in custody for a time. At last he settled in 
a house near Bunhill Fields. It was here that Paradise 
Lost\N2i'$, finished, before the end of 1665, and then pub- 
lished in 1667. 

102. Paradise Lost. — AVe may regret that Milton was 



V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 1 65 

shut away from his art during twenty years of contro- 
versy. But it may be that the poems he wrote when the 
great cause he fought for had closed in seeming defeat 
but real victory, gained from its solemn issues and from 
the moral grandeur with which he wrought for its ends 
their majestic movement, their grand style, and their 
grave beauty. During the struggle he had never for- 
gotten his art. ^' I may one day hope," he said, speak- 
ing of his youthful studies, ^^ to have ye again, in a still 
time, when there shall be no chiding. Not in these 
Noises," and the saying strikes the note of calm sublim- 
ity which is kept in Pai'adise Lost. 

As we read the great epic, we feel that the hghtness of 
heart of the Allegro^ that even the quiet classic philosophy 
of the Comus^ are gone. The beauty of the poem is like 
that of a stately temple, which, vast in conception, is 
involved in detail. The style is the greatest in the whole 
range of Enghsh poetry. Milton's intellectual force sup- 
ports and condenses his imaginative force, and his art is 
almost too conscious of itself. Sublimity is its essential 
difference. The subject is one phase of the great and 
universal subject of high poetic thought and passion, that 
struggle of Light with Darkness, of Evil with Good, 
which, arising in a hundred myths, keeps its und}ing 
attraction to the present day. But its great difficulty in 
his case was that he was obliged to interest us, for a 
great part of the poem, in two persons, who, being inno- 
cent, were without any such play of human passion and 
trouble as we find in CEdipus, ^neas, Hamlet, or Alceste. 



l66 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

In the noble art with which this is done Milton is su- 
preme. The interest of the story collects at first round 
the character of Satan, but he grows meaner as the poem 
develops, and his second degradation after he has de- 
stroyed innocence is one of the finest and most consistent 
motives in the poem. This at once disposes of the view 
that Milton meant Satan to be the hero of the epic. His 
hero is Man. The deep tenderness of Milton, his love 
of beauty, the passionate fitness of his words to his work, 
his religious depth, fill the scenes in which he paints 
Paradise, our parents and their fall, and at last all thought 
and emotion centre round Adam and Eve, until the 
closing lines leave us with their lonely image on our 
minds. In every part of the poem, in every character in 
it, as indeed in all his poems, Milton's intense individu- 
ality appears. It is a pleasure to find it. The egotism 
of such a man, said Coleridge, is a revelation of spirit. 

103. Milton's Later Poems. — Paradise Lost v^2l'^ fol- 
lowed by Paradise Regained and Sa77ison Ago?iisfes, pub- 
lished together in 1 67 1. Paj'adise Regained o^^xi'^ with 
the journey of Christ into the wilderness after his bap- 
tism, and its four books describe the temptation of Christ 
by Satan, and the answers and victory of the Redeemer. 
The speeches in it overwhelm the action, and their 
learned argument is only relieved by a few descriptions ; 
but these, as in that of Athens, are done with Milton's 
liighest power. Its solemn beauty of quietude, and a 
more severe style than that of Paradise Lost^ make us 
feel in it that Milton has grown older. 



V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 167 

In Samson Agonistes the style is still severer, even to 
the verge of a harshness which the subHmity alone tends 
to modify. It is a choral drama, after the Greek model. 
Samson in his blindness is described, is called on to make 
sport for the Philistines, and overthrows them in the end. 
Samson represents the fallen Puritan cause, and Samson's 
victorious death Milton's hopes for the final triumph of 
that cause. The poem has all the grandeur of the last 
words of a great man in whom there was now '^ calm of 
mind, all passion spent." It is also the last word of the 
music of the EHzabethan drama long after its notes 
seemed hushed, and its deep sound is strange in the 
midst of the shallow noise of the Restoration. Soon 
afterwards, November, 1674, blind and old and fallen on 
evil days, Milton died ; but neither blindness, old age, 
nor evil days could lessen the inward light, nor impair 
the imaginative power with which he sang, it seemed 
with the angels, the ^^undisturbed song of pure concent," 
until he joined himself, at last, with those "just spirits 
who wear victorious palms." 

104. His Work. — To the greatness of the artist Milton 
joined the majesty of a clear and lofty character. His 
poetic style was as stately as his character, and proceeded 
from it. Living at a time when criticism began to purify 
the verse of England, and being himself well acquainted 
with the great classical models, his work is seldom weak- 
ened by the false conceits and the intemperance of the 
Elizabethan writers, and yet is as imaginative as theirs, 
and as various. He has not their naturalness, nor all 



1 68 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

their intensity, but he has a larger grace, a lovelier col- 
our, a closer eye for nature, a more finished art, and a 
sublime dignity they did not possess. All the kinds of 
poetry which he touched he touched with the ease of 
great strength, and with so much energy, that they be- 
came new in his hands. He put a fresh life into the 
masque, the sonnet, the elegy, the descriptive lyric, the 
song, the choral drama ; and he created the epic in 
England. The hghter love poem he never wrote, and 
we are grateful that he kept his coarse satirical power 
apart from his poetry. In some points he was untrue 
to his descent from the Elizabethans, for he had no dra- 
matic faculty, and he had no humour. He summed up 
in himself the learned and artistic influences of the Eng- 
lish Renaissance, and handed them on to us. His taste 
was as severe, his verse as polished, his method and lan- 
guage as strict as those of the school of Dryden and 
Pope that grew up when he was old. A literary past 
and present thus met in him, nor did he fail, like all the 
greatest men, to make a cast into the future. He estab- 
lished the poetry of pure natural description. Lastly, he 
did not represent in any way the England that followed 
the Stuarts, but he did represent Puritan England, and 
the whole spirit of Puritanism from its cradle to its grave. 
105. The Pilgrim's Progress. — We might say that 
Puritanism said its last great words with Milton, were it 
not that its spirit continued in Enghsh life, were it not 
also that four years after his death, in 1678, John Bun- 
YAN, who had previously written religious poems, and in 



V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION i6q 

1665 the Jlo/y Ci/y, published the Pilgrinvs Progress. 
It is the journey of Christian the Pilgrim from the City 
of Destruction to the Celestial City. The second part 
was published in 1684. In 1682 he had written the 
allegory of the Holy IVar, and in 16 So The Life and 
Death of Mr. Badman^ a curious little story. I class 
the Pilgrini's Progress here, because in its imaginative 
fer\^our and imagery, and in its quahty of naturalness, it 
belongs to the spirit of the Elizabethan times. Written 
by a man of the people, it is a people's book ; and its 
simple form grew out of passionate feeling, and not out 
of self-conscious art. The passionate feeling was relig- 
ious, and in painting the pilgrim's progress towards 
Heaven, and his battle with the world and temptation 
and sorrow, the book touched those deep and universal 
interests which belong to poor and rich. Its language, 
the language of the Bible, and its allegorical form, initi- 
ated a plentiful prose literature of a similar kind. But 
none have equalled it. Its form is almost epic : its dra- 
matic dialogue, its clear types of character, its vivid 
descriptions, as of Vanity Fair, and of places, such as the 
Valley of the Shadow of Death and the Delectable 
Mountains, which represent states of the human soul, 
have given an equal but a different pleasure to children 
and men, to the villager and the scholar. 



I/O ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 



CHAPTER VI 

FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE DEATH OF POPE AND 

SWIFT, 1 660-1 745 

106. Poetry. Change of Style. — We have seen the 
natural style as distinguished from the artificial in the 
Elizabethan poets. Style became not only natural but 
artistic when it was made by a great genius like Chaucer, 
Shakespeare, or Spenser, for a first-rate poet creates 
rules of art : his work is filled with laws which other men 
see, collect, and obey. Art, which is the just and lovely 
arrangement of nature to fulfil a nobly chosen aim, is 
then born. But when the art of poetry is making, the 
second-rate poets, inspired only by their feelings, will 
write in a natural style unrestrained by rules, that is, 
they will put their feelings into verse without caring 
much for the form in which they do it. As long as they 
live in the midst of a youthful national life, and feel an 
ardent sympathy with it, their style will be fresh and im- 
passioned, and give pleasure because of the strong feel- 
ing that inspires it. But it will also be extravagant and 
unrestrained in its use of images and words because of 
its want of art. This is the general history of the style 



VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE I /I 

of the second-class poets of the middle period of Eliza- 
beth's reign, and even Shakespeare affords examples of 
this want of art. (2) Afterwards the national life grew 
chill, and the feehngs of the poets also chill. Then the 
want of art in the style made itself felt. The far-fetched 
images, the hazarded meanings, the over-fanciful way of 
putting thoughts, the sensational expression of feeling, 
in which the Elizabethan poets indulged, not only ap- 
peared in all their ugliness when they were inspired by 
no ardent feeling, but were indulged in far more than be- 
fore. ]Men tried to produce by extravagant use of words 
the same results that a passionate sense of life had pro- 
duced, and the more they failed the more extravagant and 
fantastic they became, till at last their poetry ceased to 
have clear meaning. This is the general history of the 
style of the poets from the later days of Elizabeth till the 
Civil AVar. (3) The natural style, unregulated by art, 
had thus become unnatural. When it had reached that 
point, men began to feel how necessary it was that the 
work of poetry should be subjected to the rules of art, 
and two influences partly caused and partly supported this 
desire. One was the influence of Milton. ]\Iilton, first 
by his superb genius, which, as I said, creates of itself 
rules of art, and secondly by his knowledge and imitation 
of the great classical models, was able to give the first 
example in England of a pure, grand, and finished style ; 
and in blank verse, in the lyric and the sonnet, wrote for 
the first time with absolute correctness. Another influence 
was that of the movement all over Europe towards inquiry 



1/2 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

into the right way of doing things, and into the truth of 
things, a movement we shall soon see at work in science, 
pohtics, and rehgion. In poetry it produced a school 
of criticism which first took form in France, and the 
influence of Boileau, La Fontaine, and others \^^o were 
striving after greater finish and neatness of expression, 
told on England now. It is an influence which has been 
exaggerated. It is absurd to place the ^' creaking lyre " 
of Boileau side by side with Dryden's " long resounding 
march and energy divine." Our critical school of poets 
have few French quahties in them even when they imi- 
tate the French. (4) Further, our own poets had 
already, before the Restoration, begun the critical work, 
and the French influence served only to give it a greater 
impulse. We shall see the growth of a colder and more 
correct phrasing and versification in Waller, Denham, and 
Cowley. Vigour was given to this new method in art by 
Dryden, and perfection of artifice added to it by Pope. 
The artificial style succeeded to and extinguished the 
natui^al, or to put it otherwise, a merely intellectual 
poetry finally overcame a poetry in which emotion always 
accompanied thought. 

107. Change of Poetic Subject. — The subject of the 
Elizabethan poets was Man as influenced by the Pas- 
sions, and it was treated from the side of natural feeling. 
This was fully and splendidly done by Shakespeare. But 
after a time this subject followed, as we have seen in 
speaking of the drama, the same career as the style. It 
was treated in an extravagant and sensational manner, 



VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1 73 

and the representation of the passions tended to become 
unnatural or fantastic. Milton redeemed the subject 
from this vicious excess. He wrote in a grave and natu- 
ral manner of the passions of the human heart ; he made 
strong in English poetry the religious passions of love of 
God, of sorrow for sin^ and he raised in song the moral 
passions into a solemn splendour. But with him the 
subject of man as influenced by the great passions died 
for a time. Dryden, Pope, and their followers turned 
to another subject. They left, except in Dryden's 
Dramas and Fables, the passions aside, and wrote of the 
things in which the intellect and the casuistical con- 
science, the social and pohtical instincts in man, were 
interested. In this way the satiric, didactic, philosophi- 
cal, and party poetry of a new school arose. 

108. The Poems in which the Few School began belong 
in date to the age before the Restoration, but in spirit 
and form they were the sources of the poetry which is 
called classical or critical, or artificial. Edmund Waller, 
Sir John Denham, and xA.braham Cowley are the pre- 
cursors of Dryden. Waller remodelled the heroic coup- 
let of Chaucer, and gave it the precise character which 
made it for nearly a century and a half the prevaihng 
form of verse. He wrote his earliest poems about 1623, 
in precisely the same symmetrical manner as Dryden 
and Pope. His new manner was not followed for many 
years, till Denham published in 1642 his Cooper's Hill. 
'^ The excellence and dignity of rhyme were never fully 
known," said Dryden, ''till Mr. Waller taught it, but this 



174 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

sweetness of his lyric poetry was afterwards followed in 
the epic of Sir John Denham in his Cooper's Hilly The 
chill stream of this poem, which is neither ^Myric" nor 
"epic," has the metrical cadence, but none of the grip 
and force of Dryden's verse. Cowley's earher poems 
belong to the Elizabethan phantasies, but the later were, 
with the exception of some noble poems of personal feel- 
ing, cold and exact enough for the praise of the new 
school. He invented that curious misnomer — the Pin- 
daric Ode — which, among all its numerous offspring, 
had but one splendid child in Dryden's Alexa?ider's 
Feast. When Gray took up the ode again, Cowley was 
not his master. Sir W. Davenant's Gondibert, 165 1, also 
an heroic poem, is another example of this transition. 
Worthless as poetry, it represents the new interest in 
political philosophy and in science that was arising, and 
preludes the intellectual poetry. Its preface discourses 
of rhyme and the rules of art, and embodies the critical 
influence which came over with the exiled court from 
France. The critical school had therefore begun even 
before Dryden's poems were written. The change was 
less sudden than it seemed. 

Satiric poetry, soon to become a greater thing, was 
made during this transition time into a powerful weapon 
by two men, each on a different side. Andrew Marvell's 
Satires, after the Restoration, exhibit the Puritan's wrath 
with the vices of the court and king, and his shame for 
the disgrace of England among the nations. The Hudi- 
bras of Samuel Butler, in 1663, represents the fierce 



VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1/5 

reaction which had set in against Puritanism. It is 
justly famed for wit, learning, good sense, and ingenious 
drollery, and, in accordance with the new criticism, it is 
absolutely without obscurity. It is often as terse as 
Pope's best work. But it is too long, its wit wearies us 
at last, and it undoes the force of its attack on the Puri- 
tans by its exaggeration. Satire should have at least the 
semblance of truth ; yet Butler calls the Puritans cow- 
ards. We turn now to the greatest of these poets in 
whom poetry is founded on intellect rather than on feel- 
ing, and whose verse is mostly devoted to argument and 
satire. 

109. John Dryden was the first of the new, as Milton 
was the last of the elder, school of poetry. It was late in 
life that he gained fame. Born in 1631, he was a Crom- 
wellite till the Restoration, when he began the changes 
which mark his life. His poem on the death of the Pro- 
tector was soon followed by the Astrcea Redux, which 
celebrated the return of Justice to the realm in the per- 
son of Charles II. The Annus Alii'abilis appeared in 
1667, and in this his metrical ease was first clearly marked. 
But his power of exact reasoning expressing itself with 
powerful and ardent ease in a rapid succession of con- 
densed thoughts in verse, was not shown (save in drama) 
till he was fifty years old, in the first part of Absalom and 
Achitophel, the foremost of English satires. He had been 
a playwriter for fourteen years, till its appearance in 1681, 
and the rhymed plays which he had written enabled him 
to perfect the versification which is now so remarkable 



1/6 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

in his work. The satire itself, written in mockery of the 
Popish Plot and the Exclusion Bill, attacked Shaftesbury 
as Achitophel, was kind to Monmouth as Absalom, and 
in its sketch of Buckingham as Zimri the poet avenged 
himself for the Rehearsal. It was the first fine example 
of that party poetry which became still more bitter and 
personal in the hands of Pope. It was followed by the 
Medal, a new attack on Shaftesbury, and the Afac Fleck- 
noe, 1682, in which Shad well, a rival poet, who had sup- 
ported Shaftesbury's party, was made the witless successor 
of Richard Flecknoe, a poet of all kinds of poetry, and 
master of none. Then in the same year, after the arrest 
of Monmouth, the second part of Absalom and Achito- 
phel appeared, all of which, except two hundred hues, 
was written by Nahum Tate. These were four terrible 
masterpieces of ruthless wit and portraiture. Then he 
turned to express his transient theology in verse, and the 
Religio Laid, 1682, defends and states the argument for 
the Church of England. It was perhaps poverty that led 
him to change his rehgion, and the Hind and Panther, 
1687, is a model of melodious reasoning in behalf of the 
milk-white hind of the Church of Rome. The Dissenters 
are mercilessly treated under the image of the baser 
beasts ; while at first the Panther, the Church of Eng- 
land, is gently touched, but in the end lashed with sever- 
ity. However, Hind and Panther tell, at the close, two 
charming stories to one another. It produced in reply 
one of the happiest burlesques in Enghsh poetry. The 
Country Mouse and the City Mouse, the work of Charles 



VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1 77 

Montague (Lord Halifax), and I\Iat Prior. Deprived of 
his offices at the Revolution, Dryden turned again to the 
drama and to prose, but the failure of the last of his good 
plays in 1694, drove him again from the stage, and he 
gave himself up to his T?'a?isiation of Vii-gil which he 
published in 1697. As a narrative poet his Fables ^ 
Ancient and Modern^ finished late in life, in 1699, give 
him a high rank in this class of poetry. They sin from 
coarseness, but in style, in magnificent march of verse, 
" in intellectual but not imaginative fire, in ease but not 
in grace, they are excellent. As a lyric poet his fame 
rests on the animated So7igforSt Cecilia's Day, 1687, 
and on Alexande7^'s Feast, 1697. From Milton's death, 
1674, till his own in 1700, Dryden reigned undisputed, 
and round his throne in Will's Coffeehouse, where he sat 
as " Glorious John," we may place the names of the lesser 
poets, the Earls of Dorset, Roscommon, and IMulgrave, 
Sir Charles Sedley, and the Earl of Rochester. The 
lighter poetry of the court lived on in the two last. John 
Oldham won a short fame by his Sati?^e on the Jesuits, 
1679; ^^d Bishop Ken, 1668, estabhshed, in his Afo?ii' 
ing and Fvening Hyjuns, a new type of rehgious poetry. 

no. Prose Literature of the Restoration and Revolu- 
tion. Criticism. — As Dryden was now first in poetry, so 
he was in prose. No one can understand the poetry of 
this time, in its relation to the past, to the future, and 
to France, who does not read the Critical Essays pre- 
fixed to his dramas. On the Historical Poem, on dramatic 
rhyme, on Heroic Flays, on the classical writers, and his 

N 



178 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Essay on Dramatic Poetry. He is in these essays, not 
only the leader of modern literary criticism, but the 
leader of that modern prose in which the style is easy, 
unaffected, moulded to the subject, and in which the 
proper words are put in the proper places. Dryden was 
a great originator. 

III. Science. — During the Civil War the religious 
and political struggle absorbed the country, but yet, 
apart from the strife, a few men who cared for scien- 
tific matters met at one another's houses. Out of this 
little knot, after the Restoration, arose the Royal Society, 
embodied in 1662. Astronomy, experimental chemistry, 
medicine, mineralogy, zoology, botany, vegetable physi- 
ology, were all founded as studies, and their literature 
begun, in the age of the Restoration. One man's work 
was so great in science as to merit his name being men- 
tioned among the hterary men of England. In 16 71 
Isaac Newton laid his Theory of Light before the Royal 
Society ; in the year before the Revolution his Principia 
established, by its proof of the theory of gravitation, the 
true system of the universe. 

It was in political and religious knowledge, however, 
that the intellectual inquiry of the nation was most 
shown. When the thinking spirit succeeds the active 
and adventurous in a people, one of the first things they 
will think upon is the true method and grounds of gov- 
ernment, both divine and human. Two sides will be 
taken : the side of authority and the side of reason in 
Religion ; the side of authority and the side of indi- 
vidual hberty in Politics. 



VI RESTORATIOX TO DEATH OF POPE 1 79 

112. The Theological Literature of those who declared 
that reason was supreme as a test of truth, arose with 
some men who met at Lord Falkland's just before the 
Civil War, and especially with John Hales and WiUiam 
ChiUingworth. The same kind of work, though modified 
towards more sedateness of expression, and less rational- 
istic, was now done by Archbishop Tillotson, and Bishop 
Burnet. In 1678, Cudw^orth's Intellectual System of the 
Universe is perhaps the best book on the controversy 
w^hich then took form against those who were called 
Atheists. A number of divines in the English Church 
took sides for Authority or Reason, or opposed the 
growing Deism during the latter half of the seventeenth 
century. It was an age of preachers, and Isaac Barrow, 
Newton's predecessor in the chair of mathematics at 
Cambridge, could preach, with grave and copious elo- 
quence, for three hours at a time. Theological prose 
was strengthened by the publication of the sermons of 
Edward Stillingfleet and William Sherlock, and their 
adversary, Robert South, w^as as witty in rhetoric as 
he was fierce in controversy. 

113. Political Literature. — The resistance to authority 
in the opposition to the theory of the Divine Right of 
Kings did not much enter into Hterature till after the 
severe blow that theory received in the Civil War. Dur- 
ing the Commonwealth and after the Restoration the 
struggle took the form of a discussion on the abstract 
question of the Science of Government, and was mingled 
with an inquiry into the origin of society and the ground 



l80 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

of social life. Thomas Hobbes, during the Common- 
wealth, was. the first who dealt with the question from 
the side of abstract reason, and he is also, before Dryden, 
the first of all our prose writers whose style may be said 
to be uniform and correct, and adapted carefully to the 
subjects on which he wrote. His treatise, the Leviathan, 
165 1, declared (i) that the origin of all power was in 
the people, and (2) that the end of all power was the 
commonweal. It destroyed the theory of a Divine 
Right of Kings and Priests, but it created another kind 
of Divine Right when it said that the power lodged in 
rulers by the people could not be taken away by the 
people. Sir R. Filmer supported the side of Divine 
Right in his Fat?iarcha, pubhshed 1680. Henry Nevile, 
in his Dialogue concerning Government, and James Har- 
rington in his romance. The Co??imo7iwealth of Oceana, 
published at the beginning of the Commonwealth, con- 
tended that all secure government was to be based on 
property, but Nevile supported a monarchy, and Har- 
rington — with whom I may class Algernon Sidney, whose 
political treatise on government is as statesmanlike as it 
is finely written — a democracy, on this basis. I may 
here mention that it was during this period, in 1667, that 
the first effort was made after a Science of Political 
Economy by Sir William Petty in his Treatise on Taxes. 
T\i^ political pamphlet ^2.'^ also begun at this time by Sir 
Roger L' Estrange, and George Savile, Lord Hahfax. 

114. John Locke, after the Revolution, in 1690, fol- 
lowed the two doctrines of Hobbes in his treatises on 



VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE l8l 

Civil Government^ but with these important additions — 
(i) that the people have a right to take away the power 
given by them to the ruler^ (2) that the ruler is respon- 
sible to the people for the trust reposed in him, and (3) 
that legislative assemblies are Supreme as the voice of 
the people. This was the political philosophy of the 
Revolution. Locke carried the same spirit of free in- 
quiry into the realm of religion, and in his Letters on 
Toleration laid down the philosophical grounds for lib- 
erty of religious thought. He finished by entering the 
realm of metaphysical inquiry. In 1690 appeared his 
Essay concerni?ig the Hicnian Understandings in which 
he investigated its limits, and traced all ideas, and there- 
fore all knowledge, to experience. In his clear state- 
ment of the way in which the Understanding works, in 
the way in which he guarded it and Language against 
their errors in the inquiry after truth, he did almost as 
much for the tme method of thinking as Bacon had done 
for the science of nature. 

115. The intellectual stir of the time produced, apart 
from the great movement of thought, a good deal of 
Miscellaneous Literature. The painting of short " char- 
acters " was carried on after the Restoration by Samuel 
Butler and W. Charleton. These " characters " had no 
personahty, but as party spirit deepened, names thinly 
disguised were given to characters drawn of living men, 
and Dryden and Pope in poetry, and all the prose wits 
of the time of Queen Anne and George L, made per- 
sonal and often violent sketches of their opponents a 



1 82, ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAK 

special element in literature. On the other hand, Izaak 
Walton's Lives, in 1670, are examples of kind, agreeable, 
and careful Biography. Cowley's small volume, written 
shortly before his death in 1667, gave richness to the 
Essay, and its prose almost anticipated the prose of Dry- 
den. John Evelyn's multitudinous writings are them- 
selves a miscellany. He wrote on painting, sculpture, 
architecture, timber (the Sylva), on gardening, com- 
merce, and he illustrates the searching spirit of the age. 
In William III.'s time Sir WiUiam Temple's pleasant 
Essays bring us in style and tone nearer to the great 
class of essayists of whom Addison was chief. Lady 
Rachel Russell's Letters begin the Letter-writing Kter- 
ature of England. Pepys (1660-9), and Evelyn, whose 
Diary grows full after 1640, gave rise to that class of gos- 
siping Memoirs which has been of so much use in giving 
colour to history. History itself at this time is little 
better than memoirs, and such a name may be fairly 
given to Bishop Burnet's History of his Ow?i Time and 
to his History of the Reformation, Finally Classical 
Criticism, in the discussion on the genuineness of the 
Letters of Phalaris, was created by Richard Bentley in 
1697-9. Literature was therefore plentiful. It was 
also correct, but it was not inventive. 

116. The Literature of Queen Anne and the First 
Georges. — With the closing years of Wilham III. and 
the accession of Queen Anne (1702) a Uterature arose 
which was partly new and partly a continuance of that 
of the Restoration. The conflict between those who 



VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1 83 

took the oath to the new dynasty and the Nonjurors who 
refused, the hot blood that it produced, the war between 
Dissent and Church, and between the two parties which 
now took the names of Whig and Tory, produced a mass 
of pohtical pamphlets, of which Daniel Defoe's and 
Swift's were the best ; of songs and ballads, like Lillibul- 
kro, which were sung in every street ; of squibs, reviews, 
of satirical poems and letters. Every one joined in it, 
and it rose to importance in the work of the greater men 
who mingled literary studies with their political excite- 
ment. In poUtics, all the abstract discussions we have 
mentioned ceased to be abstract, and became personal 
and practical, and the spirit of inquiry applied itself more 
closely to the questions of every- day life. The whole of 
this stirring literary Hfe was concentrated in London, 
where the agitation of society was hottest ; and it is 
round this vivid city Hfe that the literature of Queen 
Anne and the two following reigns is best grouped. 

117. It was, with a few exceptions, a Party Literature. 
The Whig and Tory leaders enhsted on their sides the 
best poets and prose writers, who fiercely satirised and 
unduly praised them under names thinly disguised. Our 
'^Augustan Age " was an age of unbridled slander. Per- 
sonalities were sent to and fro Hke shots in battle. Those 
who could do this work well were well rewarded, but the 
rank and file of writers were left to starve. Literature 
was thus honoured not for itself, but for the sake of party. 
The result was that the abler men lowered it by making 
it a political tool, and the smaller men, the fry of Grub 



184 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Street, degraded it by using it in the same way, only in a 
baser manner. Their flattery was as abject as their abuse 
was shameless, and both were stupid. They received and 
deserved the merciless lashing which Pope was soon to 
give them in the Dunciad, Being a party literature, it 
naturally came to study and to look sharply into human 
character and into human life as seen in the great city. 
It debated subjects of literary and scientific inquiry and 
of philosophy with great abihty, but without depth. It 
discussed all the varieties of social life, and painted town 
society more vividly than has been done before or since ; 
and it was so wholly taken up with this, that country life 
and its interests, except in the writings of Addison, were 
scarcely touched by it at all. Criticism being so active, 
the fonji in which thought was expressed was now espe- 
cially dwelt on, and the result was that the style of English 
prose became even more simple than in Dryden's hands ; 
and English verse, leaving Dryden's power behind it, 
reached a neatness of expression as exquisite as it was 
artificial. At the same time, and for the same reasons, 
Nature, Passion, and Imagination decayed in poetry. 

118. Alexander Pope absorbed and reflected all these 
elements. Born in 1688, he wrote tolerable verse at 
twelve years old ; the Pastorals appeared in 1 709, and 
two years afterwards he took full rank as the critical poet 
in the Essay on Criticism (1711). The next year saw 
the first cast of his Rape of the Lock, the most brilliant 
occasional poem in our language. This closed what we 
may call his first period. In 171 2 his sacred pastoral, 



VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1 85 

The Messiah, appeared, and in 17 13, when he pubHshed 
Windsor Forest, he became known to Swift and to Henry 
St. John, Lord BoKngbroke. When these, with Gay, 
Parnell, Prior, Arbuthnot, and others, formed the Scrib- 
lerus Club, Pope joined them, and soon rose into great 
fame by his Translation of the Iliad (1715-20), and by 
the Translation of the Odyssey (1723-5), in which he 
was assisted by Fenton and Broome. Being now at ease, 
for he received fully 9000/. for this work, he published 
from his retreat at Twickenham, and in bitter scorn of 
the poetasters and of all the petty scribblers w^ho annoyed 
him, the Dunciad, 1728. Its original hero was Lewis 
Theobald, but when the fourth book was published, under 
Warburton's influence, in 1742, Colley Gibber was en- 
throned as the King of Dunces instead of Theobald. 
The fiercest and finest of Pope's satires, it closes his 
second period which breathes the savageness of Swift. - 
The third phase of Pope's literary life vv^as closely linked 
to his friend Bohngbroke. It was in conversation with 
him that he originated the Essay on Man (1732-4) and 
the Imitations of Hoi^ace, The Moral Essays, or Epis- 
tles to men and women, were written to praise those 
whom he loved, and to satirise the bad poets and the 
social folhes of the day, and all who dishked him or his 
party. Among these, who has not read the Epistle to 
Dr. Arbuth7iot? In the last few" years of his life. Bishop 
Warburton, the writer of the legation of Moses and 
editor of Shakespeare, helped him to fit the Moral 
Essays into the plan of which the Essay on Man formed 



1 86 ENGLISH LITERATURE CIIAP. 

part. Warburton was Pope's last great friend ; but 
ahiiost his only old friend. By 1740 nearly all the 
members of his literary circle were dead, and a new 
race of poets and writers had grown up. In 1744 he 
died. His £/t'gy on an Unfortunate Lady and the 
Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard show how he once tried 
to handle the passions of sorrow and love. The mas- 
terly form into which he threw the philosophical prin- 
ciples he condensed into didactic poetry make them 
more impressive than they have a right to be. The 
Essay on Man, though its philosophy is poor and not 
his own, is crowded with lines that have passed into 
daily use. The Essay on Criticism is equally full of 
critical precepts put with exquisite skill. The Satires 
and Epistles are didactic, but their excellence is in the 
terse and finished types of character, in the almost cre- 
ative drawing of which Pope remains unrivalled, even by 
Dryden. His translation of Homer resembles Homer 
as much as London resembled Troy, or Marlborough 
Achilles, or Queen Anne Hecuba. It is done with great 
literary art, but for that very reason it does not make us 
feel the simpHcity and directness of his original. It has 
neither the manner nor the spirit of the Greek, just as 
Pope's descriptions of nature have neither the manner 
nor the spirit of nature. The heroic couplet, in which he 
wrote nearly all his work, he used with a correctness that 
has never been surpassed, but its smooth perfection, at 
length, wearies the ear. It wants the breaks that passion 
and imagination naturally make. Finally, he had the 



VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1 8/ 

spirit of an artist, hating those who degraded his art, and 
at a time when men followed it for money, and place, 
and the applause of the club and of the town, he loved 
it faithfully to the end, for its own sake. 

119. The Minor Poets who surrounded Pope in the 
first two-thirds of his life did not approach his genius. 
Richard Blackmore endeavoured to restore the epic in 
his Prince Arthur^ 1695, ^^^ Samuel Garth's mock heroic 
poem of the Dispensary appeared along with John Pom- 
fret's poems in 1699. In 1701, Defoe's Trueborn Eng- 
lishman defended William III. against those who said he 
was a foreigner, and Prior's finest ode, the Carmen Seen- 
lare, took up the same cause. John PhiHps is known by 
his Miltonic burlesque of The Sple?idid Shilling, and his 
Cyder was a Georgic of the apple. Matthew Green's 
Spleen and Ambrose Philip's Pastoi^als were contempo- 
rary with Pope's first poetry ; and John Gay's Shepherd'' s 
Week, six pastorals, 1714, were as Hghtly wrought as his 
famous Fables. He had a true vein of happy song, and 
Black-eyed Susan remains with the Begga^^s' Opera to 
please us still. The pohtical poems of Swift were coarse, 
but always hit home. Addison celebrated the Battle of 
Blenheim in the Ca?npaig7i, and his cultivated grace is 
found in some devotional pieces. On his death Thomas 
Tickell made a noble elegy. Prior's charming ease is 
best shown in the Hght narrative poetry w^hich we may say 
began with him in the reign of Wilham III. In Pope's 
later life a new and quickening impulse came upon poetry, 
and changed it root and branch. It arose in Ramsay's 



155, ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Gentle Shepherd^ 1725, and in Thomson's Seasons^ 1730? 
and it rang the knell of the manner and the spirit of the 
critical school. 

120. The Prose Literature of Pope's time collects 
itself round four great names, Swift, Defoe, Addison, and 
Bishop Berkeley, and they all exhibit those elements of 
the age of which I have spoken. Jonathan Swift was 
the keenest of political partisans, for his fierce and 
earnest personality made everything he did impassioned. 
But he was far more than a partisan. He was the most 
original prose writer of his time — the man of genius among 
many men of talent. It was not till he was thirty years 
old, 1697, that he wrote the Battle of the Books, concern- 
ing the so-called Letters of PhakuHs, and the Tale of a 
Tub^, a satire on the Dissenters, the Papists, and even the 
Church of England. These books, published in 1704, 
made his reputation. He soon became the finest and 
most copious writer of pamphlets England had ever 
known. At first he supported the Whigs, but left them 
for the new Tory party in 1710, and his tracts brought 
him court favour, while his literary fame was increased 
by many witty letters, poems, and arguments. On the 
fall of the Tory party at the accession of George I., 1714, 
he retired to the Deanery of St. Patrick in Ireland, an 
embittered man, and the Drapier's Letters, 1724, writ- 
ten against Wood's halfpence, gained him popularity in 
a country that he hated. In 1726 his inventive genius, 
his savage satire, and his cruel indignation with life were 
all shown in Gulliver's Travels. The voyage to Lilliput 



VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1 89 

and Brobdingnag satirised the politics and manners of 
England and Europe ; that to Laputa mocked the philoso- 
phers ; and the last, to the country of the Houyhnhnms, 
lacerated and defiled the whole body of humanity. No 
English is more robust than Swift's, no life in private 
and public more sad and proud, no death more pitiable. 
He died in 1745 hopelessly insane. Daniel Defoe's 
vein as a pamphleteer seems to have been inexhaustible, 
and the style of his tracts w^as as roughly persuasive as 
it was popular. Above all he was the journalist. His 
Review^ published twice a week for a year, was wholly 
written by himself; but he ^^ founded, conducted, and 
^^TOte for a host of other newspapers," and filled them 
with every subject of the day. His tales grew out of 
matters treated of in his journals, and his best art lay 
in the way he built up these stories out of mere sug- 
gestions. ^^The little art he is truly master of," said one 
of his contemporaries, ^' is of forging a story and impos- 
ing it on the world for truth." His circumstantial inven- 
tion, combined with a style which exactly fits it by its 
simphcity, is the root of the charm of the great story 
by which he chiefly lives in literature. Robinson C^'usoe, 
1 719, equalled Gulliver's Travels in truthful representa- 
tion, and excelled them in invention. The story lives 
and charms from day to day. But none of his stories 
are real novels ; that is, they have no plot to the working 
out of which the characters and the events contribute. 
They form the transition, however, from the slight tale 
and the romance of the Ehzabethan time to the finished 
novel of Richardson and Fielding, 



190 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 

12 1. Metaphysical Literature, which drifted into the- 
ology, was enriched by the work of Bishop Berkeley. 
The Platonic dialogue of Hylas and Philonous, 1713? 
charms us even more than his subtle and elastic Su'is^ 
1 744. These books, with AlciphroUy the Minute Philoso- 
pher, 1732, questioned the real existence of matter, — 
*'no idea can exist," he said, ^^ out of the mind," — and 
founded on the denial of it an answer to the EngHsh 
Deists, round whom in the first half of the eighteenth 
century centred the struggle between the claims of nat- 
ural and revealed religion. The influence of Shaftes- 
bury^s Characteristics, 1711, was far more literary than 
metaphysical. He condemned metaphysics, but his phi- 
losophy, such as it was, inspired Pope, and his cultivated 
thinking on several subjects made many writers in the 
next generation care for beauty and grace. He, like 
Bolingbroke, and Wollaston, Tindal, Toland, and Collins, 
on the Deists' side, were opposed by Samuel Clark, by 
Bentley, by Bishop Butler, and by Bishop Warburton. 
Bishop Butler's acute and solid reasoning treated in 
his Sermo7ts the subject of Morals, inquiring what was 
the particular nature of man, and hence determining the 
course of Hfe correspondent to this nature. His Analogy 
of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and 
Coui'se of Naticre, 1736, endeavours to make peace be- 
tween authority and reason, and has become a standard 
book. I may mention here a social satire, The Fable of 
the Bees, by Mandeville, half-poem, half-prose dialogue, 
and finished in 1729. It tried to prove that the vices 



VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE I9I 

of society are the foundation of civilisation, and is one 
of the first of a new set of books which marked the rise 
in England of the bold speculations on the nature and 
ground of society to which the French Revolution gave 
afterwards so great an impulse. 

122. The Periodical Essay is connected with the 
names of Joseph Addisox and Sir Richard Steele. 
The gay, light, graceful, literary Essay, differing from 
such Essays as Bacon's as good conversation about a 
subject differs from a clear analysis of all its points, was 
begun in France by Montaigne in 1580. Charles Cot- 
ton, a wit of Charles II.'s time, retranslated ^Montaigne's 
Essays, and they soon found imitators in Cowley and 
Sir W. Temple. But the periodical Essay was created 
by Steele and Addison. It was at first pubhshed three 
times a week, then daily, and it was anonymous, and 
both these characters necessarily changed its form from 
that of an essay by Montaigne. Steele began it in the 
Tatkr, 1709, and it treated of everything that was going 
on in the town. He paints as a social humourist the 
whole age of Queen Anne — the political and hterary 
disputes, the fine gentlemen and ladies, the characters 
of men, the humours of society, the new book, the new 
play ; we live in the very streets and drawing-rooms of 
old London. Addison soon joined him, first in the Tat- 
ler, afterwards in the Spectator, 1711. His work is more 
critical, literary, and didactic than his companion's. The 
characters he introduces, such as Sir Roger de Coverley, 
are finished studies after nature. The humour is ver}' 



192 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

fine and tender ; and, like Chaucer's, it is never bitter. 
The style adds to the charm : in its varied cadence and 
subtle ease it has not been surpassed within its own 
peculiar sphere in England ; and it seems to grow out 
of the subjects treated of. Addison's work was a great 
one, lightly done. The Spectator, the Guardian, and the 
Freeholder, in his hands, gave a better tone to manners, 
and hence to morals, and a gentler one to political and 
literary criticism. The essays pubHshed every Friday 
were chiefly on literary subjects, the Saturday essays 
chiefly on religious subjects. The former popularised 
literature, so that culture spread among the middle 
classes and crept down to the country ; the latter popu- 
larised religion. " I have brought," he says, *^ philosophy 
out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell 
in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses." 

THE DRAMA, FROM THE RESTORATION TO 1780 

123. The Drama after the Restoration took the tone 
of the court both in politics and religion, but its partisan- 
ship decayed under William III., and died in the reign 
of Queen Anne. The court of Charles IL, which the 
plays now written represented much more than they did 
the national life, gave the drama the ^^ genteel" ease 
and the immoraUty of its society, and encouraged it 
to find new impulses from the tragedy and comedy of 
Spain and of France. The French romances of the 
school of Calprenede and Scudery furnished plots to 
the playwriters. The great French dramatists, Corneille, 



VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE I93 

Racine, and Moliere, were translated and borrowed from 
again and again. The ^^ three unities " of Corneille, and 
rhyme instead of blank verse as the vehicle of tragedy, 
were adopted, but ^' the spirit of neither the serious nor 
the comic drama of France could then be transplanted 
into England." 

Two acting companies were formed on Charles II.'s 
return, under Thomas Killigrew and Davenant ; actresses 
came on the stage for the first time, the ballet was intro- 
duced, and scenery began to be largely used. Dryden, 
whose masterly force was sure to strike the key-note that 
others followed, began his comedies in 1663, but turned 
to tragedy in the Indian Queen, 1664. This play, with 
the Indian Emperour, established for fourteen years the 
rhymed couplet as the dramatic verse. His defence of 
rhyme in the Essay on Dramatic Poesy asserted the 
originality of the English school, and denied that it fol- 
lowed the French. The Maiden Queen, 1667, brought 
him nev/ fame, and then Tyrannic Love and the C071- 
quest of Granada, 1672, induced the burlesque of the 
Rehearsal^ written by the Duke of Buckingham, in which 
the bombastic extravagance of these heroic plays was 
ridiculed. Dryden now changed, in 1678, his dramatic 
manner, and following Shakespeare, '^ disencumbered 
himself from rhyme " in his fine tragedy oi All for Love, 
and showed what power he had of low comedy in the 
Spanish Friar. After the Revolution, his tragedy of 
Don Sebastian ranks high, but not higher than his brill- 
iantly written comedy of Ainphitryon, 1690. Dryden is 



194 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

the representative dramatist of the Restoration. Among 
the tragedians who followed his method and possessed 
their own, those most worthy of notice are Nat Lee, 
vfhos^t Rival Queens^ 1667, deserves its praise; Thomas 
Otway, whose two pathetic tragedies, the Orphari and 
Venice Preserved^ still keep the stage ; Thomas Southerne 
whose Fatal Marriage^ 1694, was revived by Garrick ; 
and Congreve who once turned from comedy to write 
The Mourning Bride, 

It was in comedy, however, that the dramatists ex- 
celled. Sir George Etherege originated with great skill 
the new comedy of England with She Would if She 
Could, 1668. Sedley, Mrs. Behn, Lacy, and Shadwell 
carry on to the Revolution that hght Comedy of Man- 
ners which WiUiam Wycherley's gross vigour and natural 
plots lifted into an odious excellence in such plays as the 
Cou7itry Wife and the Plain Dealer, Three great come- 
dians followed Wycherley — William Congreve, whose 
well-bred ease is almost as remarkable as his brilliant 
wit ; Sir John Vanbrugh, and George Farquhar, both of 
whom have quick invention, gaiety, dash, and sincerity. 
The indecency of all these writers belongs to the time, 
but it is partly forgotten in their swift and sustained 
vivacity. This immorality produced Jeremy ColHer's 
famous attack on the stage, 1698; and the growth of 
a higher tone in society, uniting with this attack, began 
to purify the drama, though Mrs. Centlivre's comedies, 
during the reign of Queen Anne, show no love of purity. 
Steele, at this time, whose Lying Lover makes him the 



VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1 95 

father of Sentimental comedy, wrote all his plays with 
a moral purpose. Nicholas Rowe, whose melancholy 
tragedies '' are occupied with themes of heroic love/' is 
dull, but never gross ; while Addison's ponderous tragedy 
of Cato, 1713? praised by Voltaire as the first tragedie 
raisonnable, marks, in its total rejection of the drama of 
nature for the classical style, ^^ a definite epoch in the 
history of English tragedy, an epoch of decay, on which 
no recovery has followed." Comedy, however, had still 
a future. The Beggars' Opei'a of Gay, 1728, revived an 
old form of drama in a new way. Colley Gibber carried 
on into George II. 's time the hght and the sentimental 
comedy ; Fielding made the stage the vehicle of criticism 
on the folUes, Hterature, and politics of his time ; and Foote 
and Garrick did the same kind of work in their farces. 

The influence of the Restoration drama continues, past 
this period, in the manner of Goldsmith and Sheridan 
who wrote between 1768 and 1778; but the lambent 
humour of Goldsmith's Good-natured Man and She 
Stoops to Conquer, and the wit, almost as brilliant and 
more epigrammatic than Congreve's, of Sheridan's Rivals 
and the School for Scandal, are not deformed by the 
indecency of the Restoration. Both were Irishmen, but 
Goldsmith has more of the Celtic grace and Sheridan 
of the Celtic wit. The sentimental comedy was carried 
on into the next age by Macklin, Murphy, Cumberland, 
the Colmans, and many others, but we may say that with 
Sheridan the history of the elder English Drama closes. 
That which belongs to our century is a different thing. 



196 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 



CHAPTER VII 

PROSE LITERATURE FROM THE DEATH OF POPE AND OF 
SWIFT TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, AND FROM THE 
FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE DEATH OF SCOTl^ 

124. Prose Literature. — The rapid increase of manu- 
factures, science, and prosperity which began with the 
middle of the eighteenth century is paralleled by the 
growth of Literature. The general causes of this growth 
were — 

ist, That a good prose style had been perfected^ and 
the method of writing being made easy, production in- 
creased. Men were born, as it were, into a good school 
of the art of composition. 

2ndly, The long peace after the accession of the House 
of Hanover had left England at rest, and given it wealth. 
The reclaiming of waste tracts, the increased population 
and trade, made better communication necessary; and 
the country was soon covered with a network of high- 
ways. The leisure gave time to men to think and 
write; the quicker interchange between the capital and 
the country spread over England the literature of the 
capital, and stirred men everywhere to express their 



VII PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1745 TO 1789 I97 

thoughts. The coaching services and the post carried 
the new book and the literary criticism to the villages, 
and awoke the men of talent there, who might otherwise 
have been silent. 

3rdly, The Press sent far and v/ide the news of the 
day, and grew in importance till it contained the opinions 
and writings of men hke Johnson. Such seed produced 
literary work in the country. Newspapers now began 
to play a larger part in literature. They rose under the 
Commonwealth, but became important when the censor- 
ship which reduced them to a mere broadsheet of news 
was removed after the Revolution of 1688. The politi- 
cal sleep of the age of the two first Georges hindered 
their progress ; but in the reign of George III., after a 
struggle with vrhich the name of John Wilkes and the 
author of the Letters of Junius are connected, and 
which lasted from 1764 to 1771, the press claimed and 
obtained the right to criticise the conduct and measures 
of ministers and the king ; and the further right to 
pubhsh and comment on the debates in the two Houses. 

4thly, Communication with the Continent had in- 
creased during the peaceable times of Walpole, and 
the wars that followed made it still more common. 
With its increase two new and great outbursts of litera- 
ture told upon England. France sent the works of 
Montesquieu, of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, D'Alem- 
bert, and the rest of the liberal thinkers who were 
called the Encyclopaedists, to influence and quicken 
English literature on all the great subjects that belong 



198 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

to the social and political life of man. Afterwards, 
the fresh German movement, led by Lessing and others, 
and carried on by Goethe and Schiller, added its impulse 
to the poetical school that arose in England along with 
the French Revolution. These were the general causes 
of the rapid grow^th of literature from the time of the 
death of Swift and of Pope. 

125. Prose Literature between 1745 and the French 
Revolution may be said to be bound up with the literary 
lives of one man and his friends. Samuel Johnson, 
born in 1709, and whose first important prose work, 
the Life of Savage, appeared in 1744, was the last 
representative of the literary king, who, Hke Dryden 
and Pope, held a court in London. Poor and un- 
known, he worked his way to fame, and his first poem, 
the London, i73S> satirised the town where he loved to 
live. His longer and better poem. The Vanity of 
Hunia7i Wishes, was pubhshed in 1749, and his moral 
power was never better shown than in its weighty verse. 
His one play, L7'ene, was acted in the same year. He 
carried on the periodical essays in the Rambler, 1750-2, 
but in it, as afterwards in the Ldler, grace and lightness, 
the essence of this kind of essay, were lost. Driven 
by poverty, Johnson undertook a greater work : the 
Dictionary of the English Language, 1755, and his 
celebrated letter to Lord Chesterfield, concerning its 
publication, gave the death-blow to patronage, and 
makes Johnson the first of the modern literary men 
who, independent of patrons, live by their pen and find 



VII PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1745 TO 1789 1 99 

in the public their only paymaster. He represents thus 
a new class. In 1759 he set on foot the Didactic Novel 
in Rasselas. For a time he was one of the pohtical 
pamphleteers, from 1770 to 1776. As he drew near to 
his death his Lives of the Poets appeared as prefaces 
to his edition of the poets in 1781, and hfted biography 
into a higher place in literature. But he did even more 
for literature as a converser, as the chief talker of a 
hterary club, than by writing, and we know exactly what 
a power he was by the vivid Biography, the best in our 
language, which James Boswell, with fussy devotedness, 
made of his master in 1791. Side by side with Johnson 
stands Oliver Goldsmith, whose graceful and pure 
Enghsh is a pleasant contrast to the loaded Latinism of 
Johnson's style. The Vicar of Wakefield, the History 
of Animated Natu7'e, are at one in charm, and the 
latter is full of that love of natural scenery, the senti- 
ment of which is absent from Johnson's Journey to 
the Western Isles, Both these men were masters of 
Miscellaneous Literature, and in that class, I mention 
here, as belonging to the latter half of the eighteenth 
century, Ed:^iuxd Burke's Vindication of Natural So- 
ciety, a parody of Bolingbroke ; and his Inquiry into 
the Origin of our Ideas of the Suhliine and Beautiful, 
a book which in 1757 introduced him to Johnson. Nor 
ought we to forget Sir Joshua Reynolds, another of 
Johnson's friends, who first made English art literary 
in his Discourses on Painting; nor Horace Walpole, 
whose Anecdotes of Painting, 1762-71, still please; 



200 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

and whose familiar Letters, malicious, light as froth, but 
amusing, retail with livehness all the gossip of the time. 
Among all these books on the intellectual subjects of hfe 
arose to delight the lovers of quiet and the country the 
Natural History of Selbo7me, by Gilbert White. His 
seeing eye and gentle heart are imaged in his fresh 
and happy style. 

126. The Novel. — '* There is more knowledge of the 
heart," said Johnson, '' in one letter of Richardson's than 
in all Tom Jones,'' and the saying introduces Samuel 
Richardson and Henry Fielding, the makers of the 
modern novel. Wholly distinct from merely narrative 
stories like Defoe's, the true novel is a story wrought 
round the passion of love to a tragic or joyous conclusion. 
But the name is applied now to any story of human life 
which is woven by the action of characters or of events 
on characters to a chosen conclusion. Its form, far more 
flexible than that of the drama, admits of almost infinite 
development. The whole of human life, at any time, at 
any place in the world, is its subject, and its vast sphere 
accounts for its vast production. Pamela, 1741, appeared 
while Pope was yet ahve, and was the first of Richardson's 
novels. Like Clarissa Harloive, 1748, it was written in 
the form of letters. The third of these books was Sir 
Charles Grandison. They are novels of Sentiment, and 
their purposeful morality and religion mark the change 
which had taken place in the morals and faith of litera- 
ture since the preceding age. 

Clarissa Harlowe is a masterpiece in its kind. Rich- 



VII PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1 745 TO 1789 201 

ardson himself is mastered day by day by the passionate 
creation of his characters : and their variety and the 
variety of their feelings are drawn with a slow, diffusive, 
elaborate intensity which penetrates into the subtlest 
windings of the human heart. But all the characters are 
grouped round and enhghten Clarissa, the pure and 
ideal star of womanhood. The pathos of the book, its 
sincerity, its minute reality, have always, but slowly, im- 
passioned its readers, and it stirred as absorbing an 
interest in France as it did in England. ''Take care," 
said Diderot, '' not to open these enchanting books, if 
you have any duties to fulfil." Henry Fielding followed 
Pamela with Joseph Andrews^ 1742, and Clarissa wdth 
Tom Jo7tes, 1749. At the same time, in 1748, appeared 
Tobias Smollett's first novel, Roderick Random, Both 
wrote many other stories, but in the natural growth and 
development of the story, and in the infitting of the 
characters and events tow^ards the conclusion, Tom 
Jones is said to be the Enghsh m^odel of the novel. The 
constructive power of Fielding is absent from Smollett, 
but in inventive tale-teUing and in cynical characterisa- 
tion, he is not easily equalled. Fielding, a master of 
observing and of recording what he observed, draws 
English life both in town and country with a coarse and 
realistic pencil : Smollett is led beyond the truth of 
nature into caricature. Ten years had thus sufficed to 
create a wholly new literature. 

Laurence Sterne published the first part of Tristrayn 
Shandy in the same year as Rasselas, 1759. Tristram 



202 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Shandy and the Seniimeiital Journey are scarcely novels. 
They have no plot, they can scarcely be said to have any 
story. The story of Tnstra?n Shandy wanders like a 
man in a labyrinth, and the humour is as labyrinthine 
as the story. It is carefully invented, and whimsically 
subtle ; and the sentiment is sometimes true, but mostly 
affected. But a certain unity is given to the book by the 
admirable consistency of the characters. A Httle later, in 
1766, Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield was the first and, 
perhaps, the most charming, of all those novels which we 
may call idyllic, which describe in a pure and gentle style 
the simple loves and lives of country people. Lastly, but 
still in the same circle of Johnson's friends. Miss Burney's 
Evelina, 1778, and her Cecilia, in which we detect John- 
son's Roman hand, were the first novels of society. 

127. History shared in the progress made after 1745 
in prose writing, and was raised into the rank of literature 
by three of Johnson's contemporaries. All of them were 
influenced by the French school, by Montesquieu and 
Voltaire. David Hume's History of England, finished 
in 1 761, is, in the writer's endeavour to make it a philo- 
sophic whole, in its clearness of narrative and purity of 
style, our first literary history. But he is neither exact, 
nor does he care to be exact. He does not love his sub- 
ject, and he wants sympathy with mankind and with his 
country. His manner is the manner of Voltaire, passion- 
less, keen, and elegant. Dr. Robertson, Hume's friend, 
was a careful and serious but also a cold writer. His 
histories of Scotland, of Charles V., and of America 



VII PROSE LITERATURE FRO^I I745 TO 17^9 203 

show how historical interest again began to reach beyond 
England. Edward Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall of 
the Roman Empi?r, completed in 178S, gave a new im- 
pulse and a new model to historical literature, had no 
more sympathy with humanit}^ than Hume, and his irony 
lowers throughout the human value of his history. But 
he had creative power, originality, and the enjoyment and 
imagination of his subject. It was at Rome in 1764, while 
musing amid the ruins of the Capitol, that the idea of 
writing his book arose in his mind, and his conception 
of the work was that of an artist. Rome, eastern and 
western, was painted in the centre of the world, dying 
slowly like a lion in his cave. Around it and towards it he 
drew all the nations and hordes and faiths that wrought 
its ruin ; told their stories from the beginning, and the re- 
sults on themselves and on the world of their victories over 
Rome. This imaginative conception, together with the 
collecting and use of every detail of the arts, literature, 
customs, and manners of the times he described, the read- 
ing and use of all the contemporary hterature, the careful 
geographical detail, the marshalling of all this information 
into his narration and towards his conclusion, the power 
with which he moved over this vast arena, and the use of 
a full if too grandiose a style to give importance to his 
subject, makes him the one historian of the eighteenth 
century whom modern research recognises as its master. 
128. Philosophical and Political Literature. — Hutch- 
eson, Hardey, and Reid were inferior as philosophers 
to Da\td Hume, who inquired, while he followed Locke, 



204 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

into the nature of the human understanding, and based 
philosophy upon psychology. He constructed a science 
of man ; and finally limited all our knowledge to the 
world of phenomena revealed to us by experience. In 
morals he made utility the only measure of virtue. The 
first of his books, the Treatise of Human Nature, 1739, 
was written in France, and was followed by the Inquiry 
concerniiig the Principles of Morals in 1751. TYit Dia- 
logues 071 Natural Religion were not published till after 
his death. These were his chief philosophical works. 
But in 1 741—2, he had pubhshed two volumes oi Essays 
Moral and Political, from which we might infer a politi- 
cal philosophy : and in 1752 the Political Discourses ap- 
peared, and they have been fairly said to be the cradle 
of political economy. But that subject was afterwards 
taken up by Adam Smith, a friend of Hume's, whose 
book on the Moral Sentiments, 1759, classes him also 
with the philosophers of Scotland. In his Wealth of 
Nations, 1776, by its theory that labour is the source of 
wealth, and that to give the labourer absolute freedom to 
pursue his own interest in his own w^ay is the best means 
of increasing the wealth of the country : by its proof that 
all laws made to restrain, or to shape, or to promote com- 
merce, were stumbling-blocks in the way of the wealth 
of a state, he created the Science of Political Economy, 
and brought the theory of Free Trade into practice. All 
the questions of labour and capital were now placed on a 
scientific basis, and since that time the literature of the 
whole of the subject has engaged great thinkers. As the 



VII PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1745 TO I789 205 

immense increase of the industry, wealth, and commerce 
of the country from 1720 to 1770 had thus stirred inquiry 
into the laws which regulate wealth, so now the ]^Ietho- 
dist movement, beginning in 1738, awoke an interest in 
the poor, and gave the first impulse to popular education. 
Social Reform became a literary subject, and fills a large 
space until 1832, when poUtical reform brought forward 
new subjects, and the old subjects under new forms. 
This new philanthropy was stirred into further growth 
by the theories of the French Revolution, and these 
theories, taking violent enect in France, roused into 
opposition the genius of Edmund Burke. Unlike Hume, 
whose politics were elaborated in the study, Burke wrote 
his pohtical tracts and speeches face to face with events 
and upon them. Philosophical reasoning and poetic 
passion were wedded together in them on the side of 
Conservatism, and every art of eloquence was used with 
the mastery that imagination gives. In 1766 he defended 
Lord Rockinghanvs administration : he was then wrongly 
suspected of the authorship of the Letters of Junius, 
political invectives (1769-72), whose trenchant style has 
preser\'ed them to this day. Burke's Thoughts on the 
Cause of the Present Discontents, 1770. maintained an 
aristocratic government : and the next year appeared his 
famous Speech on American Taxation, while that on 
A7nerican Conciliation, 1774, was answered by his friend 
Johnson in Taxation no Tyranny. The most powerful 
of his works were the Reflections on the French Revo- 
lution, 1790, the Letter to a Noble Lord, and the Letters 



20b ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

on a Regicide Peace, 1796-7. The first of these, an- 
swered by Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, and by 
James Mackintosh's Vindicice Gallicce, spread over all 
England a terror of the prmciples of the Revolution ; the 
third doubled the eagerness of England to carry on the 
war with France. As a writer he needed more temper- 
ance, but, if he had possessed it, we should probably have 
not had his magnificence. As an orator he ended by 
wearying his hearers, but the very men who slept under 
him in the House read over and over again the same 
speech when published with renew^ed delight. Gold- 
smith's praise of him — that he 'Svound himself into 
his subject like a serpent" — gives the reason why he 
sometimes failed as an orator, why he generally suc- 
ceeded as a writer. 

129. Prose from 1 789-1 832. Miscellaneous. — The 
death of Johnson marks a true period in our later prose 
literature. London had ceased then to be the only literary 
centre. Books were produced in all parts of the country, 
and Edinburgh had its own famous school of literature. 
The doctrines of the French Revolution w^ere eagerly 
supported and eagerly opposed, and stirred like leaven 
through a great part of the literary work of England. 
Later on, through Coleridge, Scott, Carlyle, and others, 
the influence of Lessing, Goethe, of all the new literature 
of Germany, began to tell upon us, in theology, in phi- 
losophy, and even in the novel. The great English 
Journals, the Morjiing Chroiiicle, the Times, the Morning 
Post, the Morning Herald, were all set on foot between 



VII PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1789 TO 1832 20/ 

1775 and 1793, between the war with America and the 
war with France ; and when men like Coleridge and 
Canning began to write in them the Hterature of journal- 
ism was started. A literature especially directed towards 
education arose in the Cyclopcedias^ which began in 1778, 
and rapidly developed into vast dictionaries of know- 
ledge. Along with them were the many series issued 
from Edinburgh and London of Popular Miscellanies. A 
crowd of literary men found employment in writing about 
books rather than in writing them, and the literature of 
Criticism became a powder. > The Edinburgh Review was 
established in 1802, and the Quarterly, its political op- 
ponent, in 1809, and these were soon followed by Eraser's 
and Blackwood's Magazine. Jeffrey, Professor Wilson, 
Sydney Smith, and a host of others wrote in these reviews 
on contemporary events and books. Interest in con- 
temporary stimulated interest in past literature, and Cole- 
ridge, Charles Lamb, Thomas Campbell, Hazlitt, Southey, 
and Savage Landor carried on that study of the Eliza- 
bethan and earlier poets to which Warton had given so 
much impulse in the eighteenth century. Literary quar- 
rels concerning the nature of poetry produced books like 
Coleridge's Biographia Literai'ia ; and Wordsworth's 
Essays on his own art are in admirable prose. De 
QuiNCEY, one of the Edinburgh School, is, owing to the 
over-lapping and involved melody of his style, one of our 
best, as he is one of our most various miscellaneous 
writers : and with him for mascuHne English, for various 
learning and forcible fancy, and, not least, for his vigor- 



208 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

ous lyrical work and poems, we may rank Walter 
Savage Landor, who deepened an interest in English 
and classic literature and made a literature of his own. 
Charles Lamb's inimitable fineness of perception was 
shown in his criticisms on the old dramatists, but his 
most original work was the Essays of Elia, in which he 
renewed the lost grace of the Essay, and with a humour 
not less gentle, more surprising, more self-pleased than 
Addison's. 

130. Theological Literature had received a new im- 
pulse in 1738-91 from the evangehsing work of John 
Wesley and Whitfield ; and their spiritual followers, 
Thomas Scott, Newton, and Cecil, made by their writ- 
ings the Evangelical School. William Paley, in his 
Evidences^ defended Christianity from the common-sense 
point of view ; while the sermons of Robert Hall and of 
Dr. Chalmers are, in different ways, fine examples of 
devotional and philosophical eloquence. 

131. The eloquent intelhgence of Edinburgh con- 
tinued the Literature of Philosophy in the work of 
Dugald Stewart, Reid's successor, and in that of Dr. 
Browne, who for the most part opposed Hume's funda- 
mental idea that Psychology is a part of the science of 
life. Coleridge brought his own and German philosophy 
into the treatment of theological questions in the Aids to 
Reflection, and into various subjects of life in the Friend. 
The utihtarian view of morals was put forth by Jeremy 
Bentham with great power, but his chief work was in the 
province of law. He founded the philosophy of juris- 



VII PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1789 TO 1832 2O9 

prudence, he invented a scientific legal vocabulary, and we 
ovv^e to him almost every reform that has improved our law. 
He wrote also on political economy, but that subject was 
more fully developed by ^Nlalthus, Ricardo, and James Mill. 

132. Biography and travel are Hnked at many points 
to history, and the literature of the former was enriched 
by Hayley's Cowper, Southey's Life of Nelson^ ]\IcCrie's 
Life of Knox, Moore's Life of Byroii, and Lockhart's 
Life of Scott, As to travel, it has rarely produced books 
which may be called hterature, but the works of biog- 
raphers and travellers have brought together the mate- 
rials of literature. Bruce left for Africa in 1762, and in 
the next seventy years Africa, Egypt, Italy, Greece, 
the Holy Land, and the Arctic Regions were made the 
common property of literary men. 

133. The Historical School produced Mitford's His- 
tory of Greece and Lingard's History of Eng/a?id ; but 
it was Henry Hallam who for the first time wrote history 
in this country without prejudice. His Europe during 
the Middle Ages, 181 8, is distinguished by its exhaustive 
and judicial summing-up of facts, and his Constitutional 
History of England opened a new vein of history in the 
best way. Since his time, history has become more 
and more worthy of the name of line literature, and the 
critical schools of our own day, while making truth the 
first thing, and the philosophy of history the second, do 
not disdain but exact the graces of literature. But of all 
the forms of prose literature, the novel was the most 
largely used and developed. 



2IO ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

134. The Novel. — The stir of thought made by the 
French Revolution had many side influences on novel- 
writing. The pohtical stories of Thomas Holcroft and 
William Godwin disclosed a new realm to the novelist. 
The Canterbury Tales of Sophia and Harriet Lee, and 
the wild and picturesque tales of Mrs. Radcliffe intro- 
duced the romantic novel. Mrs. Inchbald's Simple 
Story, 1 79 1, started the novel of passion, whilst Mrs. 
Opie made domestic life the sphere of her graceful and 
pathetic stories, 1806. Miss Edgeworth in her Irish 
stories gave the first impulse to the novel of national 
character, and in her other tales to the novel with a 
moral purpose, 1800-47. ^'^^^^ Austen, "with an ex- 
quisite touch which renders commonplace things and 
characters interesting from truth of description and sen- 
timent," produced the best novels we have of everyday 
society, 1811-17. With the peace of 18 15 arose new 
forms of fiction ; and travel, now popular, gave birth to 
the tale of foreign society and manners ; of these, 
Thomas Hope's Anastasius (181 9) was the first. The 
classical novel arose in Lockhart's Valerius, and Miss 
Ferrier's humorous tales of Scottish life were pleasant 
to Walter Scott. 

It was Walter Scott, however, who raised the whole 
of the literature of the novel into one of the great in- 
fluences that bear on human life. Men are still alive 
who remember the wonder and dehght with which 
Waverley (181 4) was welcomed. The swiftness of work 
combined with vast diligence which belongs to very great 



VII PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1789 TO 1832 211 

genius belonged to him. Guy Mminering was written 
in six weeks, and the Bride of La?7imermoor, as great in 
fateful pathos as Romeo and Juliet, but more solemn, 
was done in a fortnight. There is then a certain abaridon 
in his work which removes it from the dignity of the 
ancient writers, but we are repaid for this loss by the in- 
tensity, and the animated movement, the clear daylight, 
and the inspired dehght in and with which he invented 
and wrote his stories. It is not composition ; it is Scott 
actually present in each of his personages, doing their 
deeds and speaking their thoughts. His national tales 
— and his own country was his best inspiration — are 
written with such love for the characters and the scenes, 
that w^e feel his living joy and love underneath each of 
the stories as a completing charm, as a spirit that en- 
chants the whole. And in these tales and in his poems 
his own deep kindliness, his sympathy with human 
nature, united, after years of enmity, the Highlands to 
the Lowlands. In the vivid portraiture and dramatic 
reality of such tales as Old Mortality and Quentin Diir- 
ward he created the historical novel. "All is great," 
said Goethe, speaking of one of these historical tales, "in 
the AVaverley Novels ; material, effect, characters, execu- 
tion." In truth, so natural is Scott's invention, that it 
seems creation — even the landscape is woven through 
the events and in harmony with them. His comprehen- 
sive power, which drew with the same certainty so many 
characters in so many various classes, was the direct re- 
sult of his profound sympathy with the simpler feehngs 



212 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

of the human heart, and of his pleasure m writing so 
as to make human life more beautiful and more good in 
the eyes of men. He was always romantic, and his per- 
sonal romance did not fail him when he came to be old. 
Like Shakespeare he kept that to the very close. The 
later years of his life were dark, but the almost unrivalled 
nobleness of his battle against ill fortune proves that he 
was as great-hearted as he was great. ^' God bless thee, 
Walter, my man," said his uncle, '^ thou hast risen to be 
great, but thou wast always good." His last long tale of 
power was the Fair Maid of Perth, 1828, and his last 
effort, in 1831, was made the year before he died. That 
year, 1832, which saw the deaths of Goethe and Scott, 
is the close of an epoch in literature. 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 213 



CHAPTER VIII 

POETRY FROM 173OTO1832 

135. The Elements and Forms of the New Poetry. — 

The poetry we are now to study may be divided into two 
periods. The first dates from about the middle of 
Pope's life, and closes with the publication of Cowper's 
Task, 1785 : the second begins with the Task and closes 
in 1832. The first is not wrongly called a time of transi- 
tion. The influence of the poetry of the past lasted ; 
new elements were added to poetry, and new forms of it 
took shape. There was a change also in the style and 
in the subject of poetry. Under these heads I shall 
bring together the various poetical works of this period. 
(i) The influence of the didactic and satirical poetry 
of the critical school lingered among the new elements 
which first modified and then changed poetry altogether. 
It is found in Johnson's two satires on the manners of 
his time, the Londo7i, 1738, and the Vanity of Hu7Jia7i 
Wishes, 1 749 ; in Robert Blair's dull poem of The 
Grave, 1 743 ; in Edward Young's Night Thoughts^ 1 743, 
a poem on the immortality of the soul, and in his satires 
on The Universal Passion of fame ; in the tame work of 



214 KNGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Richard Savage, Johnson's poor friend ; and in the short- 
lived but vigorous satires of Charles Churchill, who died 
in 1764, twenty-one years after Savage. The Pleasures 
of the Imagination, 1 744, by Mark Akenside, belongs 
also in spirit to the time of Queen Anne, and was sug- 
gested by Addison's essays in the Spectator on Imagi- 
nation. 

(2) The study of the Greek and Latin classics re- 
vived, and with it a more artistic poetry. Men Hke 
Thomas Gray and William Collins attempted to ^' revive 
the just designs of Greece," not only in fitness of lan- 
guage, but in perfection of form. They are commonly 
placed together, but the genius of each was essentially 
different. What they had in common belonged to the 
age in which they lived, and one of these elements 
was a certain artificial phrasing from which they found it 
difficult to escape. Both sought beauty more than their 
fellows, but Collins found it more than Gray. He had 
the greater grace and the sweeter simplicity, and his Ode 
to Simplicity tells us the direction in which poetry was 
going. His best work, like The Ode to Evenings is near 
to Keats, and recalls that poet's imaginative way. His in- 
ferior work is often rude and his style sometimes obscure, 
but when he is touched by joy in '' ecstatic trial," or 
when he sits with Melancholy in love of peace and gentle 
musing, he is indeed inspired by truth and loveliness. 
He died too young to do much in a perfect way. Gray 
was different. All is clear light in his work. There is 
no gradual dusky veil such as Collins threw with so much 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1S32 21 5 

charm over his expression. Out of his love of Greek 
work he drew his fine lucidity. Out of the spirit of his 
own time and from his own cultivated experience he 
drew the moral criticism of human life which gives his 
poetry its weight, even its heaviness. It is true the 
moral criticism, even in the Elegy, shares in the com- 
monplace, but it was not so commonplace in his time, 
and it is so full of a gentle charity that it transcends his 
time. He moved with easy power over many forms of 
poetry, but there is naturalness and no rudeness in the 
power. It w^as adorned by high ornament and finish. 
The Odes are far beyond their age, especially The 
Progress of Poesy, and each kind has its own appropri- 
ate manner. The Elegy will always remain one of the 
beloved poems of Englishmen. It is not only a piece of 
exquisite work; it is steeped in England. It is contem- 
plative and might have been cold. On the contrary, 
even when it is conventional, it has a certain passion in 
its contemplation which is one of the marks of the work 
of Gray. Had he had more imagination he would have 
been greater, but the spirit of his age repressed nature in 
him. But he stands clear and bright, along with his 
brother, on the ridge between the old and the new. 
Having ascended through the old poetry, he saw the new 
landscape of song below him, felt its fresher air, and sent 
his own power into the men who arose after him. 

(3) The study of the Elizabethan and the earlier 
poets like Chaucer, and of the whole course of poetry in 
England, was taken up with great interest. Shakespeare 



2l6 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

and Chaucer had engaged both Dryden and Pope ; but 
the whole subject was now enlarged. Gray, like Pope, 
projected a history of English poetry, and his Ode on 
the Progress of Poesy illustrates this new interest. 
Thomas Warton wrote his History of English Poetry, 
1774-81, and brought the lovers of poetry into closer 
contact with Chaucer. Pope's, Theobald's, Sir Thomas 
Hanmer's, and Warburton's editions of Shakespeare were 
succeeded by Johnson's in 1765 ; and Garrick began the 
restoration of the genuine text of Shakespeare's plays 
for the stage. Spenser formed the spirit and work of 
some poets, and Thomas Warton wrote an essay on the 
Faerie Qiieene. William Shenstone's Schoolmistress, 1742, 
was one of these Spenserian poems, and so was Thom- 
son's delightful Castle of Pddolence, 1748. James Beattie, 
in the Mifistrel, 1771, also followed the stanza and man- 
ner of Spenser. 

(4) A new element — interest in the romantic past — 
was aided by the publication of Dr. Percy's Reliques of 
Ancient English Poetry, 1765. The narrative ballad and 
the narrative romance, afterwards taken up and perfected 
by Sir Walter Scott, had already begun to strike their 
roots afresh in English poetry. The Braes of Yarrow 
and Mallet's William and I^aigaret were written before 
1725. Men now began to seek among the ruder times 
of history for wild, natural stories of human life ; and 
the pleasure in these increased and accompanied the 
growing love of lonely, even of savage scenery. Even 
before the Reliques were pubHshed, Gray's power of 



VIII POETRY FROM 1 730 TO 1832 21/ 

seeing into the right thing is seen in this matter. He 
entered the new paths, and in a new atmosphere, when 
he wrote of the Norse legends, or studied what he could 
learn of the poetry of Wales. The Ossia?t, 1762, of 
James ]\Iacpherson, which imposed itself on the public 
as a translation of GaeHc epic poems, is an example of 
this new element. Still more remarkable in this way 
were the poems of Thomas Chatterton, 

" That sleepless soul who perished in his pride." 

He pretended to have discovered, in a muniment room 
at Bristol, the Death of Sir Charles Bawdin^ and other 
poems, by an imaginary monk named Thomas Rowley, 
1768. Written with quaint spelHng, and with a great 
deal of lyrical invention, they raised around them a great 
controversy. His early death, at seventeen, has, by the 
pity of it, Kfted his lyric poetry, romantic as it is, into 
more repute than it deserves. 

136. Change of Style. — We have seen how the natural 
style of the Elizabethan poets had passed into a style 
^vhich erred against the simpHcity of natural expression. 
In reaction from this the critical poets set aside natural 
feeling, and wrote according to intellectual rules of art. 
Their style lost hfe and fire ; and losing these, lost art 
and gained artifice. Unwarmed by natural feeling, it be- 
came as unnatural a style, though in a different way, 
as that of the later Ehzabethan poets. But out of the 
failure of nature without art, and of art without nature, 



2l8 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

and out of the happy union of both in scattered and 
particular examples, the way was now ready for a style 
in which the art should itself be nature^ and it found 
its first absolute expression in a few of Cowper's lyrics. 
His style, in such poems as the Lines to Mary Unwin^ 
and in The Casfaiuay, arises out of the simplest pathos, 
and yet is almost as pure in expression as a Greek elegy. 
The work was then done ; but the element of fervent 
passion did not enter into poetry till the poems of Robert 
Burns appeared in 1786. 

137. Change of Subject. Nature. — The Poets have 
always worked on two great subjects — man and nature. 
Up to the age of Pope the subject of man was chiefly 
treated, and we have seen how many phases it went 
through. There remained the subject of nature and of 
man's relation to it ; that is, of the visible landscape, sea, 
and sky, and all that men feel in contact with them. 
Natural scenery had been hitherto chiefly used as a back- 
ground to the picture of human hfe. It now began to 
occupy a much larger space in poetry, and after a time 
grew to occupy a distinct place of its own apart from 
man. Much of this was owing to the opening out of the 
wild country by new roads and to the increased safety of 
travel. It is the growth of this new subject which will 
engage us now. 

138. The Poetry of Natural Description. — We have 
already found in the poets, but chiefly among the lyrical 
poets, a pleasure in rural scenery and the emotions it 
awakened. But nature is only, as in the work of Shake- 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 219 

speare, Marvell, Milton, Vaughan, or Herrick, incident- 
ally introduced. The first poem devoted to natural 
description appeared while Pope was yet alive, in the 
very midst of the town poetry. It was the Seasofis, 
1726-30; and it is curious, remembering what I have 
said about the pecuhar turn of the Scots for natural de- 
scription, that it was the work of James Thomson, a Scots- 
man. It described the landscape and country life of 
Spring, Summer, i\utumn, and Winter. He wrote with 
his eye upon their scenery, and even when he wrote of 
it in his room, it was with *^a recollected love." The 
descriptions were too much like catalogues, the very 
fault of the previous Scottish poets, and his style was 
heavy and cold, but he was the first poet who deliber- 
ately led the English people into that separated world of 
natural description which has enchanted us in the work 
of modern poetry. The impulse he gave was soon fol- 
lowed. Men left the town to visit the country and 
record their feelings. John Dyer's Grongar Hill, 1726, 
a description of a journey in South Wales, and his Fleece^ 
1757, are full of country sights and scenes: and even 
Akenside mingled his spurious philosophy with pictures 
of the soHtudes of nature. 

Foreign travel now enlarged the love of nature. The 
wilder country of England was eagerly visited. Gray's 
letters, some of the best in the English language, de- 
scribe the landscape of Yorkshire and Westmoreland with 
a minuteness quite new in English Uterature. In his 
poetry he used the description of nature as " its most 



220 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

graceful ornament," but never made it the subject. It 
was interwoven with reflections on human Hfe, and used 
to point its moral. CoUins observes the same method 
in his Ode on the Passio7U and the Ode to Evening. 
There is as yet but httle love of nature entirely for its 
own sake. A further step was made by Oliver Gold- 
smith in his Traveller, 1764, a sketch of national man- 
ners and governments, and in his Deserted Village, 1770. 
He describes natural scenery with less emotion than 
Collins, but does not mdralise it like Gray. The scenes 
he paints are pure pictures, and he has no personal 
interest in them. The next step was made a few years 
later by some fourth-rate men like the two Wartons. 
Their poems do not speak of nature and human life, but 
of nature and themselves. They see the reflection of 
their own passions in the woods and streams, and this 
self-conscious pleasure with lonely nature grew slowly 
into a main subject of poetry. These were the steps 
towards that love of nature for its own sake which we 
shall find in the poets who followed Cowper. One poem 
of the time almost anticipates it. It is the Minstrel, 
1771, of James Beattie. This poem represents a young 
poet educated almost altogether by solitary communion 
with nature, and by love of her beauty ; and both in the 
spirit and treatment of the first part of the story resem- 
bles very closely Wordsworth's description of his own 
education l)y nature in the beginning of the Prelude. 

139. Further Change of Subject. Man. — During 
this time the interest in mankind, that is, in man inde- 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 221 

pendent of nation, class, and caste, which we have seen 
in prose, began to influence poetry. One form of it 
appeared in the pleasure the poets began to take in 
men of other nations than England ; another form of it 
— and this was increased by the Methodist revival — was 
a deep feeling for the lives of the poor. Thomson 
speaks with sympathy of the Siberian exile and the 
Mecca pilgrim, and the Trai^eller of Goldsmith enters 
into foreign questions. His Deserted Village, Shenstone's 
Schoolmistress, Gray's Elegy celebrate the annals of the 
poor. Michael Bruce in h\^ Lochleven praises the ^' secret 
primrose path of rural life," and Dr. John Langhorne in 
his Country Justice pleads the cause of the poor and 
paints their sorrows. Connected with this new element 
is the simple ballad of simple love, such as Shenstone's 
Jemmy Daivson, Mickle's Mariners Wife, Goldsmith's 
Edwin a?id Angelina, poems which started afresh a de- 
lightful type of poetry, afterwards worked out more com- 
pletely in the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth. In a class 
apart stands the Song to David^ a long poem written by 
Christopher Smart, a friend of Johnson's. Its power of 
metre and imaginative presentation of thoughts and 
things, and its mingling of sweet and grand religious 
poetry ought to make it better known. 

140. Scottish Poetry illustrates and anticipates the 
poetry of the poor and the ballad. We have not men- 
tioned it since Sir David Lyndsay, for with the exception 
of stray songs its voice was almost silent for a century 
and a half. It revived in Allan Ramsay, a friend of 



222 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Pope and Gay. His light pieces of rustic humour were 
followed by the Tea Table Miscellany and the Ever- Green, 
collections of existing Scottish songs mixed up with some 
of his own. Ramsay's pastoral drama of the Gentle Shep- 
herd, 1725, is a pure, tender, and genuine picture of 
Scottish life and love among the poor and in the country. 
Robert Ferguson deserves to be named because he 
kindled the muse of Burns, but his occasional pieces, 
1773, are chiefly concerned with the rude and humorous 
life of Edinburgh. One man, Michael Bruce, illustrates 
the Enghsh transition of which I have spoken. The 
Ballad, Scotland's dear companion, took a more modern 
but pathetic form in some Yarrow poems, in Aiild Robin 
Gray and the Lament for Flodden. The peculiarities I 
have dwelt on already continue in this Scottish revival. 
There is the same nationaUty, the same rough wit, the 
same love of nature, but the love of colour has lessened. 
141. The Second Period of the New Poetry. — The 
new elements and the changes on which I have dwelt 
are expressed by three poets — Cowper, Crabbe, and 
Burns. But before fhese we must mention the poems 
of William Bl4KE, the artist, and for three reasons, (i) 
They represent the new elements. The Poetical Sketches, 
wTitten in 1777, illustrate the new study of the Eliza- 
bethan poets. Blake imitated Spenser, and in his short 
fragment of Edwa7'd III. we hear again the note of 
Marlowe's violent imagination. A short poem To the 
Muses is a cry for the restoration to English poetry of 
the old poetic passion it had lost. In some ballad poems 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1S32 223 

we trace the influence represented by Ossian and quick- 
ened by the publication of Percy's Reliqiies. (2) We 
find also in his work certain elements which belong to 
the second period of which I shall soon speak. The 
love of animals is one. A great love of children and 
the poetry of home is another. He also anticipated in 
1789 and 1794, when his Songs of Innocence and Experi- 
ence were written, the simple natural poetry of ordinary 
life which Wordsworth perfected in the Lyrical Ballads. 
1798. Moreover, the democratic element, the hatred of 
priestcraft, and the cry against social wrongs which came 
much later into English poetry spring up in his poetry. 
Then, he was a full ]\Iystic, and through his mysticism 
appears that search after the true aims of life and after a 
freer theology which characterise our poetry after 1832. 
(3) He cast back as well as forward, and reproduced in 
his songs the spirit, movement, and music of the Ehza- 
bethan songs. The httle poems in the Songs of Inno- 
cence, on infancy and first motherhood, and on subjects 
like the Lamb, are without rival in our language for sim- 
plicity, tenderness, and joy. The Songs of Experience 
give the reverse side of the Songs of Innocence^ and they 
see the evil of the world as a child with a man's heart 
would see it — with exaggerated horror. This small but 
predictive work of Blake, coming where it did, between 
1777 and 1794. going back to EHzabethan lyrics and for- 
ward to those of Wordsworth, is very remarkable. 

142. William Cowper's first poems were some of the 
Olney Hymns, 1779. ^^'^^ ^'^^ these the religious poetry of 



224 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Charles Wesley was continued. The profound personal 
religion, gloomy even to insanity as it often became, 
which fills the whole of Cowper's poetry, introduced a 
theological element into English poetry which continually 
increased till it died out with Browning and Tennyson. 
His didactic and satirical poems in 1782 link him back- 
wards to the last age. His translation of Homer, 1791, 
and of shorter pieces from the Latin and Greek, connects 
him with the classical influence, his interest in Milton 
with the revived study of the Enghsh poets. The play- 
ful and gentle vein of humour which he showed in John 
Gilpin and other poems, opened a new kind of verse to 
poets. With this kind of humour is connected a simple 
pathos of which Cowper is a great master. The Lines to 
Mary Unwin and to his Mother's Picture prove, with 
the work of Blake, that pure natural feeling wholly free 
from artifice had returned to English song. A new ele- 
ment was also introduced by him and Blake — the love 
of animals and the poetry of their relation to man, a vein 
plentifully worked by after poets. His greatest work was 
the Task, 17S5. It is mainly a description of himself 
and a Hfe in the country, his home, his friends, his 
thoughts as he walked, the quiet landscape of Olney, the 
life of the poor people about him, mixed up with disqui- 
sitions on pohtical and social subjects, and at the end, a 
prophecy of the victory of the Kingdom of God. The 
change in it in relation to the subject of nature is very 
great. Cowper loves nature entirely for her own sake. 
The change in relation to the subject of man is equally 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 22$ 

great. The idea of mankind as a whole which we have 
seen growling up is fully formed in Cowper's mind. And 
though splendour and passion were added by the poets 
who succeeded him to the new poetry, yet they worked 
on the thoughts he had begun to express, and he is so 
far their forerunner. 

143. George Crabbe took up the side of the poetry of 
man which had to do with the lives of the poor in the 
Village^ 1783? 2,nd in the Parish Register, 1807. In the 
short tales related in these books we are brought face to 
face with the sacrifices, temptations, love, and crimes of 
humble life, and the effect of these poems in widening 
human sympathies was great among his readers. His 
work wanted the humour of Cowper, and though often 
pathetic and always forcible, was perhaps too unrelenting 
for pure pathos. He did much better work afterwards 
in his Tales of the Hall. His work on nature is as mi- 
nute and accurate, but as Hmited in range of excellence, 
as his work on man. Robert Bloomfield, himself a 
poor shoemaker, added to this poetry of the poor. The 
Farmer's Boy, finished in 1798, and the Rural Tales, 
are poems as cheerful as Crabbe 's were stern, and his 
descriptions of rural hfe are not less faithful. The poetry 
of the poor, thus started, long continued in our verse. 
Wordsworth added to it new features, and Thomas Hood 
in short pieces like the Song of the Shirt gave it a direct 
bearing on social evils. 

144. One element, the passionate treatment of love, 
had been on the whole absent from our poetry since the 

Q 



226 ENGLISH LITERATURE 



CHAP. 



Restoration. It was restored by Robert Burns. In his 
love songs we hear again, even more simply, more directly, 
the same natural music which in the age of Elizabeth en- 
chanted the world. It was as a love-poet that he began 
to write, and the first edition of his poems appeared in 
1786. But he was not only the poet of love, but also of 
the new excitement about mankind. Himself poor, he 
sang the poor. He did the same work in Scotland in 
1786 which Crabbe began in England in 1783 and Cow- 
per in 1785, and it is worth remarking how the dates run 
together. As in Cowper, so also in Burns, the further 
widening of human sympathies is shown in his tenderness 
for animals. He carried on also the Celtic elements of 
Scottish poetry, but the rattling fun of the Jolly Beggars 
and of Ta7ii 0' Shanter is united to a life-hke painting of 
human character which is peculiarly English. A large 
gentleness of feeling often made his wit into that true 
humour which is more English than Celtic, and the pas- 
sionate pathos of such poems as Mary in Heaven is con- 
nected with this vein of English humour. The special 
nationality of Scottish poetry is as strong in Burns as in 
any of his predecessors, but it is also mingled with a 
larger view of man than the merely national one. Nor 
did he fail to carry on the Scottish love of nature, though 
he shows the English influence in using natural descrip- 
tion not for the love of nature alone, but as a background 
for human love. It was the strength of his passions and 
the weakness of his moral will which made his poetry 
and spoilt his life. 



viii POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 22/ 

145. The French Revolution and the Poets. — Certain 
ideas relating to mankind considered as a whole had 
been growing up in Europe for some centuries, and we 
have seen their influence on the work of Cowper, Crabbe, 
and Burns. These ideas spoke of a return to nature, and 
of the best life being found in the country rather than 
in the tow^n, so that the simple hfe of the poor and the 
scenery of the country were idealised into subjects for 
poetry. They spoke also of natural rights that belonged 
to every man, and which united all men to one another. 
All men were equal, and free, and brothers. There was 
therefore only one class, the class of man ; only one 
nation, the nation of man, of which all were citizens. 
The divisions therefore which wealth and rank and 
caste and national boundaries had made were theo- 
retically put aside as wrong. Such ideas had been 
growing into the pohtical, moral, and religious life of 
men ever since the Renaissance, and they brought with 
them their own emotions. France, which does much of 
the formative work of Europe, had for some time past 
expressed them constantly in her literature. She now 
expressed them in the action which overthrew the Bastille 
in 1789 and proclaimed the new Constitution in the fol- 
lowing year. They passed then from an abstract to a 
concrete form, and became active powers in the world, 
and it is round the excitement they kindled in England 
that the work of the poets from 1790 to 1832 can best 
be grouped. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey ac- 
cepted them at first with joy, but receded from them 



228 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

when they ended in the violence of the Reign of Terror, 
and in the imperiaHsm of Napoleon. Scott turned from 
them with pain to write of the romantic past which they 
destroyed. Byron did not express them themselves, but 
he expressed the whole of the revolutionary spirit in its 
action against old social opinions. Shelley took them up 
after the reaction against them had begun to die away, 
and in half his poetry re- expressed them. Two men, 
Rogers and Keats, were wholly untouched by them. 
One special thing they did for poetry. They brought 
back, by the powerful feelings they kindled in men, 
passion into its style, into all its work about man, and 
through that, into its work about nature. 

But, in giving the French Revolution its due weight, 
we must always remember that these ideas existed al- 
ready in England and were expressed by the poets. The 
French outburst precipitated them, and started our new 
poetry with a rush and a surprise. But the enthusiasm 
soon suffered a chill, and a great part of our new poetry 
was impelled, not by the Revolution, but by the indig- 
nant revolt against what followed on it. Moreover, I 
have already shown that fully half of the new hues of 
thought and feeling on which the poetry of England 
ran in the nineteenth century had been laid down in 
the century which preceded it, and they were com- 
pleted now. 

146. Robert Southey began his political life with the 
revolutionary poem of IVa^ Tyler^ i794; a-^"^^ between 
1 80 1 and 1 8 14 wrote Thalaba^ Afadoc, The Curse of 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 229 

Kehama^ and Roderick the Last of the Goths, Thalaba 
and Kehama are stories of Arabian and of Indian mythol- 
ogy. They are real poems, and have the interest of 
good narrative and the charm of musical metre, but 
the finer spirit of poetry is not in them. Roderick is 
the most human and the most poetical. His Vision of 
Judgment, written on the death of George III., and ridi- 
culed by Byron in another Vision^ proves him to have 
become a Tory of Tories. Samuel T. Coleridge could 
not turn round so completely, but the stormy enthusiasm 
of his early poems was lessened when in 1796 he wrote 
the Ode on the Departing Year and France, an Ode, 
1798. His early poems are transitional, partly based 
on Gray, violent and obscure in style. But when he 
came to live with Wordsworth, he gained simplicity, 
and for a short time his poetic spirit was at the height 
of joy and production. But his early disappointment 
about France was bitter, and then, too, he injured his 
own hfe. The noble ode to Dejection is instinct not 
only with his own wasted life, but with the sorrow of 
one who has had golden ideals and found them turn 
in his hands to clay. His best work is but little, but 
unique of its kind. For exquisite metrical movement 
and for imaginative phantasy, there is nothing in our 
language to be compared with Chris tab el and Kiibla 
Khan. The Ancient Mariner, published as one of the 
Lyrical Ballads in 1798, belongs to the dim country 
between earth and heaven, where the fairy music is 
heard, sometimes dreadful, sometimes lovely, but always 



230 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

lonely. All that he did excellently might be bound up 
in twenty pages, but it should be bound in pure gold. 

147. Of all the poets misnamed Lake Poets, William 
Wordsworth was the greatest. Born in 1770, educated 
on the banks of Esthwaite, he loved the scenery of the 
Lakes as a boy, lived among it in his manhood, and 
died in 1850 at Rydal Mount, close to Rydal Lake. 
He took his degree in 1791 at Cambridge. The year 
before, he had made a short tour on the Continent, 
and stepped on the French shore at the very time 
when the whole land was ^^ mad with joy." The end 
of 1 791 saw him again in France and living at Orleans. 
He threw himself eagerly into the Revolution, joined 
the "patriot side," and came to Paris just after the 
September massacre of 1792. Narrowly escaping the 
fate of his friends the Brissotins, he got home to Eng- 
land before the execution of Louis XVL in 1793, and 
published his Descriptive Sketches and the Eve7iing 
Walk. His sympathy with the French continued, and 
he took their side against his own country. He was 
poor, but his friend Raisley Calvert left him 900/. and 
enabled him to live the simple life he had then chosen 
— the hfe of a retired poet. At first we find him at 
Racedown, where in 1797 he made friendship with 
Coleridge, and then at Alfoxden, in Somerset, where 
he and Coleridge planned and published in 1798 the 
first volume of the Lyrical Ballads. After a winter in 
Germany with Coleridge, where the Prelicde was be- 
gun, he took a small cottage at Grasmere, and the 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1S3- 23 1 

first book of The Recluse tells of his settlement m that 
quiet valley. It tells also of the passion and intensity 
of the young man who saw infinite visions of work 
before him, and who lived poor, in daily and unbroken 
joy. It was in this irradiated world that he wrote the 
best of his poems. There in 1805-6 he finished the 
Prelude, i\nother set of the Lyrical Ballads appeared 
in 1800, and in 1807 other poems. The Excursioji 
belongs to 1814. From that time till his death he 
produced from his home at Rydal Mount a long suc- 
cession of poems. 

148. Wordsworth and Nature. — The Prelude is the 
history of Wordsworth's poetical growth from a child 
till 1806. It reveals him as the poet of Nature and 
of Man. His view of nature was entirely different from 
that which up to his time the poets had held. Words- 
worth conceived, as poet, that nature was alive. It had, 
he imagined, one living soul which, entering into flower, 
stream, or mountain, gave them each a soul of their 
own. Between this Spirit in nature and the mind of 
man there was a prearranged harmony which enabled 
nature to communicate its own thoughts to man, and 
man to reflect upon them, until an absolute union be- 
tween them was estabUshed. This w^as, in fact, the 
theory of the Florentine Neo-Platonists of the Renais- 
sance. They did not care for nature, but when Words- 
worth either reconceived or adopted this idea, it made 
him the first w^ho loved nature with a personal love, 
for she, being living, and personal, and not only his 



232 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

reflection, was made capable of being loved as a man 
loves a woman. He could brood on her character, her 
ways, her words, her life, as he did on those of his 
wdfe or sister. Hence arose his minute and loving ob- 
servation of her and his passionate description of all 
her Kfe. This was his poetic philosophy with regard 
to nature, and bound up as it was with the idea of 
God as the Thought which pervaded and made the 
world, it rose into a poetic religion of nature and man. 
149. Wordsworth and Man. —The poet of nature in 
this special way, Wordsworth is even more the poet of 
man. It is by his close and loving penetration into 
the reahties and simplicities of human life that he him- 
self makes his claim on our reverence as a poet. He 
relates in the Prelude how he had been led through his 
love of nature to honour man. The shepherds of the 
Lake hills, the dalesmen, had been seen by him as 
part of the wild scenery in which he lived, and he 
mixed up their life with the grandeur of nature and 
came to honour them as part of her being. The love 
of nature led him to the love of man. It was exactly 
the reverse order to that of the previous poets. x\t 
Cambridge, and afterwards, in tlie crowd of London 
and in his first tour on the Continent, he received new 
impressions of the vast world of man, but nature still 
remained the first. It was only during his life in France 
and in the excitement of the new theories and their ac- 
tivity that he was swept away from nature and found 
himself thinking of man as distinct from her and first 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 233 

in importance. But the hopes he had formed from the 
Revolution broke down. All his dreams about a new 
life for , mankind were made vile when France gave up 
liberty for Napoleon; and he was left without love of 
nature or care for man. It was then that his sister 
Dorothy, herself worthy of mention in a history of litera- 
ture, led him back to his early love of nature and restored 
his mind. Living quietly at Grasmere, he sought in the 
simple lives of the dalesmen round him for the founda- 
tions of what he felt to be a truer view of mankind than 
the theories of the French Revolution afforded. And 
in thinking and writing of the common duties and faith, 
kindnesses and truth of lowly men, he found in man once 
more 

an object of delight, 
Of pure imagination and of love. 

With that he recovered his interest in the larger move- 
ments of mankind. His love of liberty and hatred of 
oppression revived. He saw in Napoleon the enemy of 
the human race. A series of sonnets followed the events 
on the Continent. One recorded his horror at the attack 
on the Swiss, another mourned the fate of Venice, an- 
other the fate of Toussaint the negro chief; others cele- 
brated the struggle of Hofer and the Tyrolese, others 
the struggle of Spain. Two thanksgiving odes rejoiced in 
the overthrow of the oppressor at Waterloo. He became 
conservative in his old age, but his interest in social 
and national movements did not decay. He wrote, and 



234 ENGLISH LITERATURE ciLvr. 

badly, on Education, the Poor Laws, and other sub- 
jects. When almost seventy he took the side of the 
Carbonari and sympathised with the Italian struggle. 
He was truly a poet of mankind. But his chief work 
was done in his own country and among his own folk ; 
and he is the foremost singer of those who threw around 
the lives of homely men and women the glory and sweet- 
ness of song. He made his verse " deal boldly with sub- 
stantial things " ; his theme was ^^ no other than the very 
heart of man " ; and his work has become what he de- 
sired it to be, a force to soothe and heal the weary soul 
of the world, a power like one of nature's, to strengthen 
or awaken the imagination in mankind. He lies asleep 
now among the people he loved, in the green churchyard 
of Grasmere, by the side of the stream of Rothay, in a 
place as quiet as his life. Few spots on earth are more 
sacred than his grave. 

150. Sir Walter Scott was Wordsworth's dear friend, 
and his career as a poet began with the Lay of the Last 
Minstrel, 1805. But before that he had collected, 
inspired by his revolt from the Revolution to the re- 
gretted past, the songs and ballads of the Border. 
Ma7v?iio?i was published in 1808, and the Lady of the 
Lake in 1810. These were his best poems ; the others, 
with the exception of some lyrics which touch the sad- 
ness and exultation of hfe with equal power, do not 
count in our estimate of him. He brought the narrative 
poem into a new and delightful excellence. In Ma?'- 
7nio7i and the Lady of the Lake his wonderful inventiveness 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 235 

in story and character is at its height, and it is matched 
by the vividness of his natural description. No poet, 
and in this he carries on the old Scottish quality, is a 
finer colourist. Nearly all his natural description is of 
the wild scenery of the Highlands and the Lowland 
moorland. He touched it with a pencil so hght, grace- 
ful, and true, that the very names are made forever 
romantic ; while his faithful love for the places he de- 
scribes fills his poetry with the finer spirit of his own 
tender humanity. 

151. Scotland produced another poet in Thomas 
Campbell. His earliest poem, the Pleasures of Hope, 
1799, belonged in its formal rhythm and rhetoric, and 
in its artificial feehng for nature, to the time of Thomson 
and Gray rather than to the newer time. He will chiefly 
live by his lyrics. Hohenlmde?i, the Battle of the Baltic^ 
the Mariners of England, are splendid specimens of the 
war poetry of England ; and the Song to the Evening Star 
and Lord Ullin's Daughter, full of tender feeling, mark 
the influence of the more natural style that Wordsworth 
had brought to excellence. 

152. Rogers and Moore. — The Pleasures of Mejnory, 
1792, and the Italy, 1822, of Samuel Rogers, are the 
work of a slow and cultivated mind, and contain some 
laboured but fine descriptions. The curious thing is that, 
li\ing apart in a courtly region of culture, there is not a 
trace in all his work that Europe and England and 
society had passed during his hfe through a convulsion 
o\ change. To that convulsion the best poems of Tho^us 



236 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Moore may be referred. They are the songs he wrote 
to the Irish airs collected in 1796. The best of them 
have for their hidden subject the struggle of Ireland 
against England. Many of them have lyrical beauty and 
soft melody. At times they reach true pathos, but their 
lightly lifted gaiety is also dehghtful. He sang them 
himself in society, and it is not too much to say that they 
helped by the interest they stirred to further Catholic 
Emancipation. 

153- ^^^^ turn to very different types of men when we 
come to Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Of the three, Lord 
Byron had most of the quality we call force. Born in 
1788, his Hours of Idleness, a collection of short poems, 
in 1807, was mercilessly lashed in the Edinbwgh Review. 
The attack only served to awaken his genius, and he 
replied with astonishing vigour in the satire of E^iglish 
Bards and Scotch Reviewers in 1809. Eastern travel 
gave birth to the first two cantos of Childe Harold, 181 2, 
to the Giaour and the Bride of Abydos in 1 813, to the 
Corsair and Lara in 1814. The Siege of Corinth, Par- 
isina, the Prisoner of Chillon, Afanfred, and Childe 
Harold were finished before 18 19. In 18 18 he began 
a new style in Beppo, w^hich he developed fully in the 
successive issues of Don Juan, 1819-24. During this 
time he published a number of dramas, partly historical, 
as his Marino Fa Hero, partly imaginative, as the Cain. 
His hfe had been wild and useless, but he died in trying 
to redeem it for the sake of the freedom of Greece. At 
Missolonghi he was seized with fever, and passed away 
in April, 1824. 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 23/ 

154. The Position of Byron as a Poet is a curious one. 
He is partly of the past and partly of the present. Some- 
thing of the school of Pope clings to him ; yet no one so 
completely broke away from old measures and old man- 
ners to make his poetry individual, not imitative. At 
first, he has no interest whatever in the human questions 
which were so strongly felt by Wordsworth and Shelley. 
His early work is chiefly narrative poetry, written that 
he might talk of himself and not of mankind. Nor has 
he any philosophy except that which centres round the 
problem of his own being. Cain, the most thoughtful 
of his productions, is in reality nothing more than the 
representation of the way in which the doctrines of 
original sin and final reprobation affected his own soul. 
We feel naturally great interest in this strong personality, 
put before us with such obstinate power, but it wearies 
us at last. Finally it wearied himself. As he grew in 
power, he escaped from his morbid self, and ran into 
the opposite extreme in Don Juan, It is chiefly in it 
that he shows the influence of the revolutionary spirit. 
It is written in bold revolt against all the conventionaHty 
of social morality and religion and poUtics. It claimed 
for himself and for others absolute freedom of individual 
act and thought in opposition to that force of society 
which tends to make all men after one pattern. This 
was the best result of his work, though the way in which 
it was done can scarcely be approved. As the poet of 
nature he belongs also to the old and the new school. 
Byron's sympathy with nature is a sympathy with himself 



238 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

reflected in her moods. But he also escapes from this 
position of the later eighteenth century poets, and looks 
on nature as she is, apart from himself; and this escape 
is made, as in the case of his poetry of man, in his later 
poems. Lastly, it is his colossal power and the ease that 
comes from it, in which he resembles Dryden, as well as 
his amazing productiveness, which mark him specially. 
But it is always more power of the intellect than of the 
imagination. 

155. In Percy Bysshe Shelley, on the contrary, the 
imagination is first and the intellect second. He pro- 
duced while yet a boy some worthless tales, but soon 
showed in Queeji Mad, 1813. the influence of the revolu- 
tionary era, combined in him with a violent attack on the 
existing forms of religion. One half of Shelley's poetry, 
and of his heart, was devoted to help the world towards 
the golden year he prophesied in Queen Mab^ and to 
denounce and overthrow all that stood in its way. The 
other half was personal, an outpouring of himself in his 
seeking after the perfect ideal he could not find, and, 
sadder still, could not even conceive. Queen Mab is an 
example of the first, Alastor of the second. The hopes 
for man with which Queen Mab was written grew cold, 
and he turned from writing about mankind to describe 
in Alastor the Hfe and wandering and death of a lonely 
poet. But the Alastor who isolated the poet from man- 
kind was, in Shelley's own thought, a spirit of evil, and 
his next poem, the Revolt of Isla?n, 181 7, unites him 
ai^ain to the interests of humanitv. He wrote it with the 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 239 

hope that men were beginning to recover from the apathy 
and despair into which the failure of the revolutionary 
ideas had thrown them, and to show them what they 
should strive and hope for, and destroy. The poem 
itself has finer passages in it than Alastor, but as a whole 
it is inferior to it. It is far too formless. The same year 
Shelley vrent to Italy, and never returned to England. 
He then produced Rosalind and Helen 2ind Julian and 
Maddalo ; but the new health and joy he now gained 
brought back his enthusiasm for mankind, and he broke 
out into the splendid lyric drama of Prometheus JjJibound, 
Asia, at the beginning of the drama separated from Pro- 
metheus, is the all-pervading Love which in loving makes 
the universe of nature. When Prometheus is united to 
Asia, the spirit of Love in man is wedded to the spirit of 
Love in nature, and all the world of man and nature is 
redeemed. The marriage of these two, and the distinct 
existence of each for that purpose, is the same idea as 
Wordsworth's differently expressed ; and Shelley and he 
are the only two poets who have touched it philosophi- 
cally, Wordsworth with most contemplation, Shelley with 
most imagination. Prometheus Unbouiid is the finest 
example we have of the working out in poetry of the idea 
of a regenerated universe, and the fourth act is the 
choral song of its emancipation. Then, Shelley, having 
expressed this idea with exultant imagination, turned to 
try his matured power upon other subjects. Two of 
these were neither personal nor for the sake of man. 
The first, the drama of the Cenci, is as restrained in 



240 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

expression as the previous poem is exuberant : yet there 
is no poem of Shelley's in which passion and thought 
and imagery are so wrought together. "The second was 
the Adonais^ a lament for the death of John Keats. It 
is a poem written by one who seems a spirit about a 
spirit, and belongs in expression, thought, and feeling to 
that world above the senses in which Shelley habitually 
lived. Of all this class of poems, to which many of his 
lyrics belong, Epipsychidion is the most impalpable, but, 
to those who care for Shelley's ethereal world, the finest 
poem he wrote. Of the same class is the Witch of Atlas, 
the poem in which he has personified divine Imagination 
in her work in poetry, and imaged all her attendants, and 
her doings among men. 

As a lyric poet, Shelley, on his own ground, is easily 
great. Some of the lyrics are purely personal ; some, as 
in the very finest, the Ode to the West Windy mingle 
together personal feeling and prophetic hope for man- 
kind. Some are lyrics of pure nature ; some are dedi- 
cated to the rebuke of tyranny and the cause of liberty ; 
others belong to the indefinite passion he called love, 
and others are written on visions of those " shapes that 
haunt Thought's wildernesses." They form together the 
most sensitive, the most imaginative, and the most musi- 
cal, but the least tangible lyrical poetry we possess. 

As the poet of nature, he had the same idea as Words- 
worth, that nature was alive : but while Wordsworth 
made the active principle which filled and made nature 
to be Thought, Shelley made it Love. The natural 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 24I 

world was dear then to his soul as well as to his eye, 
but he loved best its indefinite aspects. He wants the 
closeness of grasp of nature which Wordsworth and Keats 
had, but he had the power in a far greater degree than 
they of describing the cloud-scenery of the sky, the 
doings of the great sea, and vast realms of landscape. 
He is in this, as well as in his eye for subtle colour, the 
Turner of poetry. What he might have been we cannot 
tell, for at the age of thirty he left us, drowned in the sea 
he loved, washed up and burned on the sandy spits near 
Pisa. His ashes lie beneath the walls of Rome, and C^r 
cordium^ " Heart of hearts," written on his tomb, well 
says what all who love poetry feel when they think of 
him. 

156. John Keats Hes near him, cut off like him before 
his genius ripened ; not so ideal, but for that very reason 
more naturally at home with nature than Shelley. In 
one thing he was entirely different from Shelley — he had 
no care whatever for the great human questions which 
stirred Shelley ; the present was entirely without interest 
to him. He marks the close of that poetic movement 
which the ideas of the Revolution had crystalKsed in 
England, as Shelley marks the attempt to revive it. 
Keats, seeing nothing to move him in an age which had 
now sunk into apathy on these points, went back to 
Spenser, and especially to Shakespeare's minor poems, 
to find his inspiration ; to Greek and mediaeval hfe to 
find his subjects, and established, in doing so, that which 
has been called the literary poetry of England. Leigli 



242^ ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

Hunt, his friend and Shelley's, did part of this work. 
The first subject on which Keats worked, after some 
minor poems in 181 7, was Endy??iion, 1818, his last, 
Hyperion, 1820. These, along with La?7iia, which is, on 
the whole, the finest of his longer poems, were poems of 
Greek life. Endymio7i has all the faults and all the 
promise of a great poet's early work, and no one knew 
its faults better than Keats, whose preface is a model of 
just self-judgment. Hyperion, a fragment of a tale of the 
overthrow of the Titans, is itself Hke a Titanic torso. Its 
rhythm was derived from Milton, but its poetry is wholly 
his own. But the mind of Keats was as yet too luxuriant 
to support the greatness of his subject's argument, and 
the poem dies away. It is beautiful, even in death. 
Both poems are filled with that which was deepest in the 
mind of Keats, the love of loveliness for its own sake, 
the sense of its rightful and pre-eminent power ; and in 
the singleness of worship which he gave to Beauty, Keats 
is especially the ideal poet. Then he took us back into 
mediaeval romance, and in this also he started a new 
type of poetry. There are two poems which mark this 
revival — Isabella, and the Eve of St. Agnes, Mediaeval 
in subject, they are modern in manner ; but they are, 
above all, of the poet himself. Their magic is all his 
own. In smaller poems, such as the Ode on a Grecian 
Urn, the poem To Autumn, to the Nightingale, and 
some sonnets, he is the fairest of all Apollo's children. 
He knew the inner soul of words. He felt the world 
where ideas and their forms are one, where nature and 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 243 

humanity, before they divide, flow from a single source. 
In all his poems, his painting of nature is as close as 
Wordsworth's, but more ideal ; less full of the imagina- 
tion that links human thought to nature, but more full of 
the imagination which broods upon enjoyment of beauty. 
He was not much interested in human questions, but as 
his mind grew, humanity made a more and more impera- 
tive call upon him. Had he lived, his poetry would have 
dealt more closely with the heart of man. His letters, 
some of the most original in the English language, show 
this clearly. The second draft of Hyperio?i, unpublished 
in his lifetime, and inferior as poetry to the first, accuses 
himself of apartness from mankind, and expresses his 
resolve to write of ]\Ian, the greatest subject of all. 
Whether he could have done this well remains unknown. 
His career was short ; he had scarcely begun to write 
when death took him away from the loveliness he loved 
so keenly. Consumption drove him to Rome, and there 
he died, save for one friend, alone. He Hes not far 
from Shelley, on the ^' slope of green access," near the 
pyramid of Caius Cestius. He sleeps apart : he is him- 
self a world apart. 

157. Modern English Poetry. — Keats marks the ex- 
haustion of the impulse which began with Burns and 
Cowper. There was no longer now in England any 
large wave of public thought or feeling such as could 
awaken the national emotion and life out of which poetry 
is naturally born. We have then, arising after the deaths 
of Keats, Shelley, and Byron, a number of pretty little 



244 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

poems, having no inward fire, no idea, no marked char- 
acter. They might be written by any versifier at any 
time, and express pleasant, indifferent thought in pleas- 
ant verse. Such were Mrs. Hemans' poems, and those 
of L. E. L., and such were Tennyson's earUest poems, in 
1830. There were, however, a few men who, close to 
1820 and 1822, had drunk at the fountain of Shelley, and 
who, for a very brief time, continued, amid the apathy, 
to write with some imagination and fervour. T. L. Bed- 
does, whose only valuable work was done between 1822 
and 1825, was one of these. George Darley, whose Sylvia 
earned the praise of Coleridge, was another. They rep- 
resent in their imitation of Shelley, in their untutored 
imagination, the last struggles of the poetic phase which 
closed with the death of Byron. AVhen Browning imitated 
or rather loved Shelley in his first poem, Pauline^ it was 
to bid Shelley farewell ; when Tennyson imitated Byron 
and was haunted by Keats in his first poems, it was also 
to bid them both farewell. Then Tennyson and Browning 
passed on to strike unexpected waters out of the rocks 
and to pour two rivers of fresh poetry over the world. 
For with the Reform agitation, and the twofold religious 
movement at Oxford, which was of the same date, a 
novel national excitement came on England, and with 
it the new tribe of poets arose among whom we have 
Hved. The elements of their poetry were also new, 
though we can trace their beginnings in the previous 
poetry. This poetry took up, so far as Art could touch 
them, the theological, social, and even the political ques- 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 245 

tions which disturbed England. It came, before long, 
moved by the critical and scientific inquiries into the 
origins of religion and man and the physical world, to 
represent the scepticism of England and the struggle 
for faith against doubt. It gave itself to metaphysics, 
but chiefly under the expression and analysis of the 
characters of men and women. It played with a vast 
variety of subjects, and treated them all with a personal 
passion which filled them with emotion. It worked 
out, from the point of view of deep feehng, the relation 
of man to God, and of man to sorrow and immor- 
tality. It studied and brought to great excellence the 
Idyll, the Song, and the short poem on classic subjects 
with a reference to modern hfe. It increased, to an 
amazing extent, the lyrical poetry of England. The 
short lyric was never written in such numbers and of 
such excellence since the days of Elizabeth. It recapt- 
ured and clothed in a new dress the Arthurian tale, and 
linked us, back through many poets, to the days of 
legend and dehght. It re-established for us in this new 
time, as the most natural and most emotional subject of 
English poetry, England, her history, her people, and 
her landscape, so that the new poets have described not 
only the whole land but the natural scenery and histori- 
cal story, the humian and animal life of the separate 
counties. Our native land, as in the days of Elizabeth, 
has been idealised. 

Nor did this new impulse stay in England only. It 
went abroad for its subjects, and especially to Italy. It 



246 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAF. 

Strove to express the main characteristics of periods of 
history and of art, of the origins of religions and of Chris- 
tianity, of classic and Renaissance thought at critical 
times, and of lyric passion in modern life. Indeed, it 
aimed at a universal representation of human life and 
at a subtle characterisation of individual temperaments. 
Thus, it was a poetry of England, and also of the larger 
world beyond England. 

Apart from the main stream of poetry, there were 
separate streams which represented distinct passages in 
the general movement. The Son7iets of Charles Tenny- 
son Turner, which began in 1830, stand by their grace 
and tenderness at the head of a large production of 
poetry which describes with him the shy, sequestered, 
observant Hfe of the English scholar and lover of nature, 
of country piety and country people. One man among 
them stands alone, William Barnes, of Dorsetshire. The 
time will come when the dialect in which he wrote will 
cease to prevent the lovers of poetry from appreciating 
at its full worth a poetry which, written in the mother- 
tongue of the poor and of his own heart, is as close to 
the lives and souls of simple folk as it is to the woods 
and streams, the skies and farms of rustic England. 
Among them also is Coventry Patmore, who, though 
alive, belongs to the past. What Barnes did for the 
peasant and the farmer, Patmore did for the cultivated 
life which in quiet English counties gathers round the 
church, the parsonage, and the hall, the lives and piety 
of the English homes that are still the haunts of ancient 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 247 

peace. His work^ with its retired and careful if over- 
delicate note, is a true picture of a small part of English 
life. But it has the faults of its excellences. 

The High Church and Broad Church movements, as 
they were called, produced two sets of poetical writers w^ho 
also stand somewhat apart from the main line of English 
poetry. The first is best represented by John Keble, 
whose Christiaii Year, in 1827, with its poetry, so good 
within its own range, so weak beyond it, w^as the source 
of many books of poems of a similar but inferior char- 
acter. On the other hand the impulse towards a wider 
theology was combined in some poets with a laxer moral- 
ity than England is accustomed to maintain, and Bailey's 
FestuSy 1839, ^^'^s ^^^ fi^^^ o^ ^ number of sensational 
poems which painted the struggles of the spirit towards 
immortal hfe, and of the senses towards mortal love with 
equal effervescence. A noble translation of Omai- 
Khayyam by Edward Fitzgerald, and the fine ballad-songs 
and Andromeda of Charles Kingsley, may also be said to 
flow apart from the main stream in which poetry flowed. 

Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning (whose wife 
will justly share his fame) began to write between 1830 
and 1833, and continued their work side by side for fifty 
years, when they died, almost together. Both of them 
were wholly original, and both of them, differing at every 
point of their art, kept with extraordinary vitality their 
main powers, and w^ere capable of fresh invention, even 
to the very last. They passed through a long period of 
change and development, during which all the existing 



248 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 

foundations of faith and knowledge and art were dug out, 
investigated, tested, and an attempt made to reconstruct 
them, an attempt which still pursues its work. They 
lived and wrote in sympathy with the emotions which 
this long struggle created in the minds of men, and ex- 
pressed as much of these emotions as naturally fell within 
their capability and within the sphere of poetry. And 
this they did with great eagerness and intensity. Their 
love of beauty and of their art was unbroken, and they 
had as much power, as they had desire, to shape the 
thought and the loveliness they saw — great poets who 
have illuminated, impelled, adorned, and exalted the 
world in which we live. 

At first the great inquiry into the roots of things dis- 
turbed the next generation of poets, those who stepped 
to the front between 1850 and i860 ; and as Arthur Hugh 
Clough expressed the trouble of the want of clear light 
on the fates of men and their only refuge in duty, so 
Matthew Arnold, more deeply troubled, embodied in his 
poetry, even in his early book of 1852, the restlessness, 
the dimness, the hopelessness of a world which had lost 
the vision of the ancient stars and could cling to nothing 
but a stoic conduct. But he did this with keen sorrow, 
and with a vivid interest in the world around him. Then 
about i860 the poets grew weary of the whole struggle. 
Theology, the just aim and ends of life, science, pohtical 
and social questions, ceased on the whole to awaken the 
slightest interest in them. Exactly that which took place 
in the case of Keats now took place. The poets sought 



VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 249 

only for what was beautiful, romantic, of ancient heroism, 
far from a tossed and wearied world, far from all its 
tiresome questions. Dante G. Rossetti, whose sister, 
Christina, touched the romantic and religious lyric with 
original beauty, was the leader of this school. He, and 
others still alive, found their chief subjects in ancient 
Rome and Greece, in stories and lyrics of passion, in 
mediaeval romance, in Norse legends, in the old England 
of Chaucer, and in Italy. But this literary poetry has 
now almost ceased to be produced, and has been suc- 
ceeded as in 1825 by a vast criticism of poetry, and by a 
multitudinous production, much inspired from France, of 
poetry, chiefly lyrical, which has few elements of endur- 
ance and Httle relation to life. What will emerge from 
this we cannot tell, but we only need some new human 
inspiration, having a close relation to the present, and 
bearing with it a universal emotion, to create in England 
another school of poetry as great as that which arose in 
the beginning of this century, and worthy of the tradi- 
tions which have made England the creator and lover of 
poetry for more than 1200 years. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 



A.D. 

449 .... English History begins in Britain, The Jutes land 
in Thanet. 

597 .... Christianity brought into England by Augustine; 

627 .... And into Xorthumbria by Paulinus. 

635, et seq. . The Celtic Missionaries evangelise Xorthumbria. 

664 .... The Synod of Whitby. 

670-80 . The poems of Csedmon. 

669-71 . . School of Canterbury; Archbishop Theodore.- 

68o?-7or . . The literary work of Ealdhelm. (Born 656.) 

690 (cir) . The laws of Ine. 

674-82 . . Wearmouth, Jarrow, and their libraries, founded by 
Benedict Biscop. 

673 .... Baeda, Benedict's scholar, born. 

731. . . . Bseda's Ecclesiastical History. (Death of Baeda, 735.) 

735 .... Ecgberht, Archbp. of York, establishes the School 
of York and the Library. (Died 766.) 

766-82 . . .Ethelbert and Alcuin make York the centre of 
European learning. 

782-92 . . Alcuin carries the learning of York to Europe. 

793 .... The first Yiking raid on North umbria. 

Cynewulf (born about 720) wrote his poems prob- 
ably in the latter half of this century. 

800 .... Charles the Great cro\\"ned emperor. 

830 . . . = About this date the " Heliand," an Old Saxon 
poem, was written. 
251 



252 

A.D. 
867-76 . 

871. , , 

886 (cir.) 

901 . . 
913 • • 
937 • • 
961-88 
964, et seq. 



971 . . 
991 . . 
991-96 

1031 . 
1042-65 



1066 
1066 
1070 



IO71 

1085 
1087 
1093 
1095 

1100 

1 109 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 

The final destruction of the seats of learning in 
Northumbria by " the Army." 

The accession of Alfred. 

y^lfred begins his literary work. The English 
Chronicle is first carefully edited in this reign. 

Death of yElfred. 

Rolf settles in Normandy. 

Song of Battle of Brunanburh, in the Chronicle. 

Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury. 

King Eadgar, with /Ethelwold and Oswald, Bishops 
of Winchester and Worcester, revives English 
monachism in Wessex and East Anglia. 

Blickling Homilies. 

Song of the Battle of Maldon. 

.^Ifric's Homilies; after 1005, his Treatise on the 
Old and New Testament. (Died 1020-25.) 

Swegen of Denmark becomes King of England. 

Reign of Edward the Confessor. England's first 
contact with French Romance. 

Latin translation of a late Greek Romance, Apol- 
lonius of Tyre, and of two small books belonging 
to the Alexander Saga. 

The Lay of Roland is brought to England. 

Willi a ?n /. 

Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury. 

The "Charlemagne," Norman poem, before the end 
of the nth century. 

The Exeter Book given by Leofric, Bishop of Exe- 
ter, to his Cathedral. 

The Domesday Book. 

William II. crowned by Lanfranc. 

Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury. 

The beginning of the Crusades. The stories of the 
East soon come to the West. 

Henry I. 

University of Paris rises into importance with Wil- 
liam of Champeaux and Peter Abelard. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 



25: 



A.D. 




mo 




1118 




1 1 20 




1126- 


■43 . • 


II 29 




1135- 


-54 • . 


^^35 




1132- 


■3S ■ • 



II54 



J^S4 • 
1155 • 
II 60 . 

1156-59? 
1160-70 

(cir.) 

1160-70 
1 1 70 . 

1 1 70-90 

1 1 80-90 ? 



i/8g 
1198 



Miracle play of St. Catherine. 

End of Florence of Worcester's Chronicle. 

End of William of Malmesbury's Historia regum 

Anglorum. 
William of Malmesbury's Historiae novelise. 
End of Simeon of Durham's Chronicle. 
Henry of Huntingdon's History of England. 

Geoftrey of ?vIonmouth's Plistoria Britonum. Final 
form, 1 147. 

English Chronicle ends. 

Gesta Stephani. Hexham Chroniclers. 

At the end of reign of Henry L and during 

Stephen's reign the Cistercians brought about a 

religious revival. The Abbeys founded in the 

North. 

I/enry II. 

Wace's Geste des Bretons (Brut d'Engleterre). 

Benoit de Sainte More's Roman de Troie. 

John of Salisbury's Polycraticus. 

Walter Map's De Nugis curialium; Golias. 

The Lais of T^Iarie de France; written in Eng- 
land. 

Robert de Boron's Le petit Saint Graal. 

Wace finishes his Roman de Rou. 

Le Grand Saint Graal; Queste de Saint Graal; 
Lancelot du Lac, by Walter Map? 

Chrestien de Troye's Conte de Graal (Percevale). 

Chronicle of Benedict of Peterborough, continued 
by Roger of Howden. 

Ranulf de Glanvill's work on English law. 

Richard Fitz Nigel's Dialogus de Scaccario. 

Gerald de Barri (Giraldus Cambrensis) — Itinera- 
rium; Journey in Wales; Conquest of Ireland — 
written in this and the two following reigns. 

Richard L 

William of Newborough's Chronicle. 



254 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 



In the middle of the 1 2th century the troubadour poetry of 
Southern France rose into its fine flower in the work of Bernart 
de Ventadorn. He had been preceded by Guilhem de Poitiers, 
the first troubadour of whom we know. Bertrand de Born, 
Geoffrey Rudel, Pierre Vidal are famous troubadours of this cen- 
tury. The lyrics of Northern France, those of the trouveres, grew 
out of this Provencal poetry. No lyrical poetry in England in this 
century. The chansons de geste of the last century in France 
were largely added to in this. Great literary activity prevailed in 
Wales from the middle of this century down to the death of 
Llewellyn in 1282. The epic of the Cid was shaped about 1 160-70 
out of ballads that had sung the border battles of Moors and 
Spaniards. In Germany the IMinnelieder arose in the middle ot 
the century, and Wolfram von Eschenbach introduced his new 
conception of Parzival into the Arthurian legend. Also in the 
middle of this century the Niebelungen Lied was cast into its form. 
Italian poetry began with CiuUo d'Alcamo in Sicily, and Folca- 
chiero of Siena, in the years 1172-78. In this century also the 
mediaeval tales from India were cast into the History of the Seven 
Sages, and into the Disciplina Clericalis. These materials were 
moulded into various shapes by the French poets, and afterwards 
in England. 



A.D. 

iigg 



1 150-1200 
1200-30 . 
1205 . . 
1205 (cir.) 
1215 . . 
1210-50 . 

12/6 

1235-73 • 



Chronicle of Richard of Devizes. Annals of Barn- 
well. Chronicle of Jocelyn of Brakelond, and 
others. 

Sayings of Alfred. 

Roman de la Rose (Part I.) by Guillaume de Lorris. 

Loss of Normandy. 

Layamon's Brut. 

The Orrmulum. The Great Charter. 

Reign of Frederick II. Italian poetry in Sicily. 

J7enry IlL 

Chronicle of Ri>ger of Wendover at St. Albans. 

Matthew Paris' Greater Chronicle; History oi 
England; Lives of earlier abbots. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 



255 



A.P. 


1220-76 . . 


1220 (cir.) . 


1220 (cir.) . 


1221 . . . 


1224 . . . 


1225 . . . 


1225-35?. . 


1230-40 (cir.' 


1235-53 . . 


1250 (cir.) . 


1258 . . . 


1262 . . . 


1264 . . . 


1264 • • • 


1268 . . . 



Guido Guinicelli. Father of new national litera- 
ture in Italy. 

Owl and Nightingale (Dorsetshire). 

Ancren Riwle (Dorsetshire). 

Coming of Black Friars to England (Dominicans). 

Coming of Grey Friars (Franciscans). 

St. Francis of Assisi's Song to the Sun. 

The Bestiary. 

King Horn. 

Robert Grossetete (Bp. of Lincoln). Chastel 
d'amour. 

Genesis and Exodus. 

Provisions of Oxford, Proclamation uf King's 
adhesion to them — in English as well as French. 

Miracle plays acted by the Town Guilds. 

Battle of Lewes — Ballad. 

Corpus Christi Day appointed; fully observed. 131 1. 

Roger Bacon's Opus Majus. 

After Lewes and its war-ballad, the Love Lyric begins in such 
verse as the Throstle and the Nightingale and the Cuckoo Song. 
Also the religious lyric in such verse as the Sorrows of Christ and 
the Lullaby, and the Love Song of Thomas de Hales, a Franciscan. 
Also the satirical lyric, such as the Land of Cockayne. In this 
reign Adam Marsh (De Marisco) has a famous Franciscan school 
at Oxford. The Harrov/ing of Hell, first dramatic piece in Enghsh, 
belongs to this reign. Northumbria begins again to write in second 
half of century. 

I2'j2 . . . Edward I. 

The Alexander Romance in English in this reign. 

The Tristan Story is also widely spread. 
Romances arise in Northumbria. Many war-ballads. 
1280-87 • • Guido delle Colonne's (a poet of Sicily, born 1250) 
Historia Destructionis Trojae. Visited England 
and wrote Historia de regibus et rebus Angliie. 
1290=93 . . Dante's Vita Nuova. 
1300 (cir.) . Gesta Romanorum. 



256 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 



A.D. 




1300 


(cir.) 


1303 




1300-05 . 
TQCi7 




-21 . 


1324 




1320- 


-30 . 



^327 
1330 



1340 


(cir.) 


1340 




I34I 




1345 




^zzz- 


■52 ■ 


1350. 


et seq 


1350-53 • 


1350 


(cir.) 



1355 • • • 

1355 (cir.) . 
1360-70 (cir.) 



Havelok the Dane, 

Robert Manning of Brunne's Handlyng Synne. 
His Chronicle finished 1338. 

Roman de la Rose (Part II.), by Jean de Meung. 

Edward II. 

Dante's Divine Comedy. 

Court of Love at Toulouse. 

Cursor ^lundi (Northumbrian). William Shore- 
ham's Poems (Kentish). A Cycle of Homilies, 
Legend Cycle (both Northumbrian) are now 
worked at. Sir Tristrem; Sire Otuel; Guy of 
Warwick ; Bevis of Hampton ; all now in English. 

Edward III 

Pilgrimage of Human Life, a French poem by 
Guillaume de Delguileville. Legenda Aurea, 
by Jacobus a Voragine, Bishop of Genoa. 

Guillaume deMachault.(B.i282(cir.); d.i37o(cir.).) 

Richard Rolle of Hampole's Pricke of Conscience. 

Dan ^lichel of Northgate's Ayenbite of Inwyt. 

Petrarca crowned laureate at Rome. 

Death of Richard Aungerville, Bishop of Durham, 
writer of Philobiblion; leaves library to Oxford. 

Songs of Laurence Minot on King Edward's wars. 

Collections of books, and University foundations in 
England now begin to serve literature. 

Decameron of Boccaccio. 1341, La Teseide. 1348, 
Filostrato. 

Romances are now written on the Welsh marches 
in alliterative Old English verse ; subject and 
f?iise-en-scene French, verse and diction national. 
Among first of these, Joseph of Arimathie anfl 
two fragments of an Alexander Romance. 

William of Palerne. 1350? Tale of Gamelyn. 

Anturs of Arthur at the Tarnawathelan. 

Sir Gawayne and the Grene \ Perhaps by the 
Knight, Pearl, Cleanness > "philosophical 
and Patience. J Strode.'' 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 



257 



A.D. 
1362-63 
1366-70 
1373 
1375 
1377 
1377 
1378? 

^379 

1380 
1380-S, 

I ^82-8; 



Langland's Vision of Piers the Plowman. (A-Text.) 

Chaucer's first poems. Book of the Duchess, 1369. 

Petrarca's Griselda. 

Barbour's Bruce. 

Richard II. 

B-Text of Piers the Plo^yman. 

WychPs Summa in Theologia. 

Xew College, Oxford; Latin School at Winchester 

founded by William of Wykeham. 
Wyclif s translation of the Bible. 
Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida. 
Chaucer's Parlement of Foules, Hous of Fame, 

Legend of Good Women. 
WycliPs Trialogus. (Died 13S4.) 
Chaucer's Prologue and many of the Canterbury 

Tales. 
Cower' s Confessio Amantis. 
Chrysoloras comes to Florence to teach Greek. 
Guarino Guarini teaches Greek at Venice, Pdorence, 

Ferrara. (Born 13 70; died 1460.) 
1398? . . . C-Text of Piers the Plowman. 

From Boccaccio to the middle of the i6th century a great mass of 
Italian Xovelle were produced ; used in England for plays, stories, l\:c. 



1383 (cir.) 
1385-89 . 

1393? . • 
1395 • • 



^399 

1400 

1411-1 

^4^3 

1415 

1421 

1^22 
1422 

1422 
1423 

1424-2 



Henry IV. 

Death of Chaucer and Langland. 

Hoccleve's Gouvernail of Princes. 

He/ny V. 

Eustache Deschamps dies. Alain Chartier and 

Christine de Pisan, his contemporaries. 
Lydgate's Troy Book. 1424-25, Story of Thebes. 
Henry VI. 

James I. of Scotland : The King's Quair. 
"^ Past on Letters begin; end 1509. 
John Aurispa brings from Greece to Italy more than 

200 MSS. 
Lydgate's Falles of Princes. 



258 



ENGLISH LITERiVTURE 



1427 . . . Filelfo, laden with MSS., returns from Greece to 
Florence. 

Pletho, Bessarion, Gaza have diffused the spirit of ancient learn- 
ing in Italy by 1440. Universities at Pavia, Turin, Ferrara, Flor- 
ence, &c. Eight hundred MSS. left by Niccolo Niccoli to Florence, 
in 1436; cradle of the Laurentiaii Library. 



1449 . 

1453 . 

1450 (ci 
1460-80 
1461 

VI470 
1474-76 
1481 
1483 
1485 
1495? 
1501 

1503 
1504 
1506 
1507 

1507-0S 

^509 
1509 

1513 
1513? 

1516 
1516 

1518? 



Pecock's Repressor of Overmuch blaming of the 

Clergy. 
Fall of Constantinople. 
Invention of Printing. 
Poems of Robert Henryson. 
Edward IV. 
Malory's Morte Darthur. 
Caxton sets up printing press at Westminster. 
Luigi Pulci's Morgante INIaggiore. 
Edward V. Richard III. 
Henry VII. 

Boiardo's Orlando Inamorato begun. 
Gawin Douglas' Palace of Honour. 
Dunbar's Thistle and Rose. 
Sannazaro's Arcadia. 
Hawes' Pastime of Pleasure. 
Skelton's Bowge of Court; Boke of Phyllip 

Sparowe. 
Dunbar's Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins. 
Henry VIII. 
Erasmus : Praise of Folly. 
Gawin Douglas : Translation of the .^neid. 
Sir Thos. More's Life of Edward V. and History 

of Richard III. written. 
Trissino's Sofonisba; hrst use of blank verse in 

Italy. 
Ariosto's Orlando Furioso begun; the rest in 1532. 
Sir Thos. More's Utopia, written in Latin. 
Skelton's Colin Clout. 
Amadis de Gaul translated into English. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 



259 



A.D. 
1524 . 

1527 . 

1528 . 
1520-40 

1532, et seq, 

1535 
1540 
1541? 

1545 

1547 

1549 

1549-5- 

1551 

1553 
1553 

1557 
1558 
1559 

1561-62 

1562 . 

1563 
1563 
1570 

1571 

1575 

1576 



1576 

1576 
1577 



Ronsard born. (Died 1586.) 

Tyndale's translation of the New Testament. 

Lyndsay's Dreme. 

Heywood's Interludes. 

Rabelais' Gargantua, &c. 

Lyndsay's Satire of the Three Estates. 

Cranmer's Bible. 

Ralph Roister Doister, first English comedy, printed 

1566. 

Ascham's Toxophilus. 

Edivard VI. 

Latimer's Sermon on the Ploughers. 

English Prayer Book. 

Ralph Robinson's translation of More's Utopia into 
English. 

Mary. 

Lyndsay's Monarchic. 

Tottel's Miscellany; poems by Wyatt and Surrey. 

Elizabeth. 

Sackville's Mirror for iNIagistrates. 

Gorboduc, the first English Tragedy. Printed as 
Ferrex and Porrex, 15 71. 

Phaer's Virgil. Many other translations of the 
classics before 1579. 

Foxe's Book of ^Martyrs. 

Sackville's Induction to Mirror for ^vlagistrates. 

Ascham's Schoolmaster. 

R. Edward's Damon and Pithias printed. 

Comedy of Gammer Gurton's Needle printed. Play 
of Apius and Virginia printed. 

Paradise of Dainty Devices; 1578, Gorgeous Gal- 
lery of Gallant Inventions; 1584, Handfull of 
Pleasant Dehghts — all Poetical ^Miscellanies. 

Three theatres built in London ; Blackfriars, the 
Curtain, the Theatre. 

Gascoigne's Steele Glas. (First verse satire.) 

Holinshed's Chronicle. 



26o 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 



A.D. 
1579-80 
1579 . 
1579 • 
1580-81 
I5SO-SS 
I581 . 
1582? . 
I583-I625? 

1584-92 
1584-98 

1586 . 

1587 . 
1588-90 
1588-90 
1588-90? 
1589 
1590 
I59I 
1593 
1593 
1594 
1593-96 

1595 • 

1596, et seq. 
1594-96 

1597 • 
1597-98 



1598-99 
1596-98 

1599 . 

1600 . 

1600 . 



Lyly's Euphues. 1580-1601 (cir.) his dramas. 
^Spenser's Sheplieards Calendar. 

North's Plutarch's Lives. 

Sidney's Arcadia and Apologie for Poetrie. 

Montaigne's Essaies. 

Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata. 

Watson's Hecatompathia or Passionate Century. 

Pamphleteers : Greene, Lodge, G. Harvey, Nash, 
Dekker, Breton. 

Dramas of Greene. 1583, ct seq., Tales in prose. 

Dramas of Peele. 

Warner's Albion's England. 

jNIarlowe's Tamburlaine acted. (Printed 1590.) 

^Marlowe's Faustus, Jew of Malta, Edward IL 

Series of iNIartin ]\Iarprelate Tracts. 

Love's Labour's Lost. 

Hakluyt's Voyages. 

Spenser's Faerie Queene (Books i.-iii. 1596, iv.-vi.). 

Harrington's translation of Ariosto's Orlando. 

Donne's Satires (died 1626). 

Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. 

Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity (Bks. i.-iv. 1597, v.). 

!Many collections of Sonnets. 

Daniel's Hist, of Civil Wars of York and Lancaster, 
■Ben Jonson's Dramas. (Died 1637.) 

^lerchant of Venice. 
"'Bacon's Essays. (First set.) 

Hall's Satires. 

Chapman's Homer (First part). Sylvester's trans- 
lation of Du Bartas. 

Marston's Satires. 

Drayton's Barons' Wars and England's Heroical 
Epistles. 

The Globe Theatre built. 

England's Helicon; P^n gland's Parnassus; Belve- 
dere; all poetical ^^liscellanies. 

Fairfax's translation of Tasso, 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 



261 



A.D. 

1600 . 

I60O-S1 



1603 (cir.) ? 
1603 . 
1603 . 

1603 . 

1604 . 

1605 . 
1606-16 
1609 
1610-25 (ci: 
1610 

1611 . 

1612 . 
1612-20 
1613-14 
1613-16 



1613 

1613 
1613 
1614 
1615 
1615 
1616 
1621 
1622 
1623 
1623 
1623 



Lope de Vega began his dramas about 1590, and 
continued writing till his death in 1635. 

Calderon, who had a large influence on the French 
Drama of the 17th and iSth centuries, on the 
English Restoration Drama, and on the Italian, 
German and English poetry of i8th and 19th 
centuries. 

The Return from Parnassus. 

Florio's translation of IMontaigne's Essays. 

ycuiies I. 

Knolles' History of the Turks. 

Authorised Version of the Bible. 

Bacon's Advancement of Learning (Books i. and ii.). 

Cervantes' Don Quixote. 

Shakespeare's Sonnets published. 

Dramas of Beaumont and Fletcher. 

Giles Fletcher's Christ's Victory. 

Speed's History of Great Britain. 

Webster's tirst drama, The White Devil (printed). 

T. Shelton's Translation of Don Quixote. 

Drayton's Polyolbion. 

Browne's Britannia's Pastorals; 1614, The Shep- 
herd's Pipe. 

Purchas his Pilgrimage. 

Wither's Abuses Stript and Whipt. 

Drummond of Blawthornden's hrst poem. (D. 1649.) 

Raleigh's History of the World. 

Sandys' Travels. 

Wither's Shepherd's Hunting. 

Chapman's Homer finished. Shakespeare dies. 

Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. 

]\Iassinger's Virgin ^lartyr. (Died 1639.) 

Webster's Duchess of ]^Ialfi (printed). 

Waller's first poems. 

The " First Folio " of Shakespeare. 

Chapman, Tourneur, ^^liddleton, and other drama- 
tists wrote during this reij^n. 



262 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 



A.D. 

1628 

1629 

I63I 

1635? 

1632-37 

1634 
1636 
1636 
164c 
I 641 
I 64 I 
1642 
1642 
1642 
1642 
1644 

1645 
1645 

1646 

1647 

1647 

1647-^8 

1648 

1648 

1649 

i64g 
1650 
1650 
1650-52 
1650-56 
1650-57 
1651 . 
1653 • 
1653 . 



Charles I. 

Harvey's De jNIotu Sanguinis. 
Alilton's Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity. 
George Herbert's Temple. 

Sir Thos. Browne's Religio ^Nledici (pub. 1642). 
Milton's Allegro, Penseroso, Comus, Lycidas. 
Phineas Fletcher's Purple Island. 
Ford's historical play of Perkin Warbeck. 
Corneille's tirst tragedy, the Cid. His last play, 1675^ 
French Academy founded. 
Thomas Carew's poems. 
INIilton's first pamphlet. 

Evelyn's Diary begins (ends 1697; published 1818). 
Theatres closed. 

Fuller's Holy and Profane state. 
Denham's Cooper's Hill. 
Hobbes' De Cive. 
Milton's Areopagitica. 
■' Waller's poems. 
Meetings held which lead to formation of the 

Royal Society. 
Crashaw's Steps to the Temple. 
Jeremy Taylor's Liberty of Prophesying. 
Cowley's ^listress. Davideis, i64i(?). 
Herrick's Noble Numbers; Hesperides. 
J. Beaumont's Psyche or Love's Mystery. 
Suckling's Fragmenta Aurea. 
Lovelace's Lucasta. 
Cojn m nwealth . 
Baxter's Saints' Rest. 
Milton's Defensio pro Populo Anglicano. 
Marvell's Garden poems written. 
Vaughan's Silex Scintillans. 
Pascal's Provincial Letters. 
Hobbes' Leviathan. 
Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler. 
Moliere's first play. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 



263 



A.D, 
1656 
1659 
1659 
1659-60 

i66o 
j66o 



1662 
1663 
1663 
1663 



1663-67 

1664 

1667 

1667 

1667 

1667 

1668 

1670 

1670 

1671 

1671-77 

1672 

1674 

1678 

1678 

1678 

1680 

1681 

16S2 

1684 



Harrington's Oceana. 
^Dryden's Stanzas on the Death of Cromwell. 

Corneille's Essay on the Three Unities. 

Pepys' Diary begins (finished 1669; pubh&bed 1825). 

Boileau's first satire. 

Charles II. 

Re-opening of the theatres by Davenant ar^d 
KiUigrew. 

Royal Society incorporated. 

Dryden's first play, the Wild Gallant. 

Butler's Hudibras (Part I.). 

Algernon Sidney's Discourses concerning Govern- 
ment, published 169S. 

The London Public Intelligencer. (Becomes the 
London Gazette, 1666.) 

Plays of Racine. Esther, 16S9 (?). Athalie, i69o(?). 

La Fontaine's first book of Contes. 

Dryden's Annus ^lirabilis; Essay on Dramatic Poesy. 

Cowley's Essays. 

^vlilton's Paradise Lost. 

Petty's Treatise on Taxes. 

La Fontaine's first book of P^ables. (Died 1695.) 

Izaak Walton's Lives. 

Pascal's Les Pensees. 

Paradise Regained. Samson Agonistes. 

Dramas of Wycherley. 

Dryden's Essay on Heroic Plays. 

Boileau's Art of Poetry. 

Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, (Part I.) 

Dryden's All for Love. (Li blank verse.) 

Cudworth's Litellectual System of the Universe. 

Pllmer's Patriarch a. 
, Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel, (First part.) 

Dryden's ^ledal, IMacflecknoe, Religio Laici. 
. Pilgrim's Progress. (Part H.) 

Clarendon's History of the Great Reliellion written 
during this reign. (Published 1707.) 



264 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 



1687 . 
1687 • 
1687 . 
i68S-8g 
1690 . 
1692 . 
1693-1700 
1694 . 
1697-1705 
1698 . 
1698-1707 
1700 . 
1700 . 
1^02 
1702-05 

1704 . 

1704 . 
1704-13 
1709 . 
1 709-1 1 
1709-44 
1709 . 
1711-12-1^ 

1712 . 

1713 . 

1714 . 

1714 . 
1715-20 
1 71 5, et seq. 
1719 . 
1724-34 
1725 . 
1726-30 
1726-27 



yames IT. 

Newton's Principia. 

Defoe's first tract. 

La Bruyere's Les Caracteres. 

The Revolution. William III. 

Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding. 

Sir Wm. Temple's Miscellanea, Vol. ii. 
"'Congreve's dramas. 

Dryden's Last Play. 

Dramas of Vanbrugh. 

Collier's Short View of the Immorality of the Stage. 

Dramas of Parquliar. 

Dryden's Fables. (Nov. 1699.) 

Prior's Carmen Seculare. 

Amie. 

Steele's Plays. (1722. Comedy of the Conscious 
Lovers, his last play.) 

Swift's Tale of a Tub, Battle of the Books. (Writ- 
ten by 1596-97.) 

Addison's Campaign. Rosamond (opera), 1706. 

Defoe's Review. 

Mat Prior's Poems. 

The Tatler. 

Writings of Bishop Berkeley. 

Pope's Pastorals. (Written 1704-05.) 

The Spectator. 



Pope's Rape of the Lock. 

Addison's Cato. 

Gay's Shepherd's Week. 

George I. 

Pope's Homer's Iliad. 

Le Sage's Gil Bias. 

Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. 



(Final form 1714.) 



1720-25, Other novels. 



Bp. Burnet's History of my own Times published. 
Allan Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd. (First form 1 723.) 
Thomson's Seasons. 
Swift's Gulliver's Travels. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 



265 



A.D. 

IJ2J . . . George II. 

1727 . . . Gay's Fables. 1728, Beggar's Opera. 

1728 . . . ''I'ope'sDunciad. (Firstform. Others in 1729-42-43.) 
1728 . . . Voltaire's Ilenriade. 

1730 . . . IVIarivaux : Le jeude ramouretdahasard. (D.1763.) 

1732-34 . . Pope's Essay on ]\Ian. ]\Ioral Essays, 1732-35. 

^735 • • • Johnson's Translation of Lobo's Voyage to Abys- 
sinia. (His hrst work.) 

1736 . . . Butler's Analogy of Religion. 

1737 . . . Shenstone's Schoolmistress. (Final form, 1742.) 

1738 . . . -Johnson's London. 

1739 . . , Hume's Treatise of Human Natm-e. 

1740 . . . Richardson's Pamela. 1748, Clarissa Harlowe. 

1 74 1 . . . Warburton's Divine Legation. 
1740-41 . . Hume's Essays. 

1742 . . . Fielding's Joseph Andrews. 1749, Tom Jones, 
1744 . . . Johnson's Life of Savage. 

1744 . . . Akenside's Pleasures of the Lnagination. 

1746 . . . Collins' Odes. 

1742-69 . . ' Gray's Poems. (Collected edition 1768.) 

1748 . . . wSmoUett's Roderick Random. 

1748 . . . Thomson's Castle of Indolence. 

1748 . . . ^Montesquieu's Esprit des Lois. 

1749 . . . Diderot's Encyclopedic begun. 

1749 . . . Johnson's Vanity of Human AYishes; Irene. 

1750-52 . . Johnson's Rambler. 

1751-52 . . Hume'sPrinciplesof Morals and Pulitical Discourses. 

1754 . , . Richardson's Sir Chas. Grandison. 
1754-61 . . Hume's History of England. 

1755 . o . Johnson's Dictionary. 

1756 , . . Burke's Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful; Vin- 

dication of Natural Society. 

1757 . . . Hume's Natural History of Religion. 

1758 . . . Robertson's History of Scotland. 1769, Charles V. 
175S . . . Lessing's Litteraturbriefe. 

^759 • • • Johnson's Rasselas. 

1759 . . . Adam Smith's Moral Sentiments. 



266 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 



A.D. 

1759 . . . Sterne's Tristram Shandy. (Vols, i and 2.) 
1759-90 . . Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses on Art. 
lybo . . . George III. 

1760 . . . Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloise. 

1760 . . . Sterne's Tristram Shandy. (2vols. ; finished 1 765.) 

1761-64 . . Poems of Churchill. 

1762 . . . Falconer's Shipwreck. 

1760-65 . . Macpherson's Ossian. 

1765 . . . . Goldsmith's Traveller. 

1764-70 . . Chatterton's Poems. 

1765 . . . Bishop Percy's Reliques of English Poetry. 

1765 . . . H. Walpole's Castle of Otranto. 

1766 . . . Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield. (Written 1762?) 
1766 . . . Lessing's Laokoon. 

1768-78 . . Plays of Goldsmith and Sheridan. 

1769 . . . 'Burke's Present State of the Nation. 
1769-72 . . 'Letters of Junius. 

1770 . . . Burke's Thoughts on the Present Discontents. 
1770 . . . Goldsmith's Deserted Village. 

1771-74 . . Beattie's Minstrel. 

1773 . . . Ferguson's Poems. 

1774 . . . Burke's Speech on American Taxation. 

1774 . . . Goethe's Werther. 

1775 . . . Beaumarchais : Le mariage de Figaro. 

1775 . . . Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America. 

1776 . . . Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. 
1777-81 . . T. Warton's History of English Poetry. 
1776-88 . . Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 

1777 . . , Robertson's History of America. 

1778 . , . Frances Burney's Evelina. 
1779-81 . . Johnson's English Poets. 

1 781 . . . Schiller's Die Rauber. 

1783 . . . Crabbe's Village. 

1783 . . . Blake's Poetical Sketches^ 

1785 . . . Cowper's Task. 

1786 . . . Samuel Rogers' Poems. 
1786 . , . Burns' fu'st Poems. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 267 

A.D. 

1789 . . . Blake's Songs of Innocence. 1794, Songs of 
Experience. 

1789 . . . White's Natural History of Selborne. 

1790 . . . Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. 
1791-92 . . Paine's Rights of Man. 1794-95, Age of Reason. 

1 79 1 . . . Boswell's Life of Johnson. 
1792-9 ;_ . . Arthur Young's Travels in France. 

1793 . . . Godwin's Enquiry concerning Political Justice. 

1793 . . . ^'Wordsworth's Evening Walk ; Descriptive Sketches. 

1794 . . . Coleridge and Southey's Fall of Robespierre. 
1796 . . . Poems; by Coleridge and Lamb. 

1796 . . . Scott's translation of Burger's Lenore. 
1796-97 . . Burke's Letters on a Regicide Peace. 

1797 . . . '''Poems by Coleridge, Lamb, and Lloyd. 

1797 . . . Poetry of the Anti- Jacobin. 

1798 . . . Lyrical Ballads; by Coleridge and Wordsworth. 
1798 . . . Malthus' Essay on the Principles of Population. 
1798 . . . Landor's Gebir and other Poems. 

1798 . . . Ebenezer Elliott's Vernal Walk. 

1799 . . . Scott's translation of Gotz von Berlichingen. 

1799 . . . Campbell's Pleasures of Hope. 

1800 . . . * Coleridge's translation of Schiller's Wallenstein. 

1801 . . . 'Southey's Thalaba. (He continued writing till 1843.) 

1802 . . . Scott's Border Minstrelsy. 
1802 . . . The Edinburgh Review. 

1805 . . . -Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel. 

1807 . o . Byron's Hours of Idleness. 

1807 . . Wordsworth's Poems in 2 vols. 

1807 . . . T. Moore's Irish Melodies begun. 
1807-08 . . Lamb's Specimens of Dramatic Poetry. 

1808 . . . Scott's Marmion. 1810, Lady of the Lake. 

1809 . . . The Quarterly Review. 

1809 . . . Byron's English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. 

1810 . . . Allan Cunningham's first published poems. (D. 1842.) 
181 1-18 . . Novels of Jane Austen. 

1822-33 • • Prof. Wilson's Noctes iVmbrosianoe. (In Blackwood.) 

181 2-18 . . Byron's Childe Harold. 



268 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 



1813 

1814 

1814 

1814 

1816 

1816? 

1817 

1817 

1817 

181 7, et seq. 

1818 . . 

1820 

1820 

1820 

1821 

1821 

1821 

1821-23 

1822 

1822 

1824 

1826 

1827 



1830 
1830 
1830 

1831, 
1831 
1832 



et seq. 



'Shelley's Queen Mab. 1816, Alastor. 
Scott's Waverley. (His novels continue till 183 1.) 
Wordsworth's Excursion. 
H. Gary's Translation of Dante. 
Coleridge's Christabel ; Kubla Khan. 
Leigh Hunt's Story of Rimini. 

Byron's Manfred. i8i8,Beppo; 1819-23, Don Juan. 
Coleridge's Biographia Literaria. 
Keats' first poems. 
Hazlitt's Dramatic and Poetical Criticisms. (Died 

1830.) 

Hallam's View of the State of Europe during the ]Mid- 
dle Ages. 1827, Constitutional Hist, of England. 
Geo7'ge IV. 

Keats' Hyperion and other Poems. 
Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. 
Byron's Cain and other dramas. 
DeQuincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater. 
Shelley's Adonais and Epipsychidion. 
Lamb's Essays of Elia. 
T. L. Beddoes' Bride's Tragedy. 
Rogers' Italy. 

-Carlyle's translation of Goethe's Willielm Meister. 
Poems by Two Brothers. (Chas. and Alfd. Tennyson.) 
Keble's Christian Year. 
William IV. 

Alfred Tennyson : Poems. 
Moore's Life of Byron. 
Mrs. Hemans' Songs of the Affections. 
Ebenezer Elliott's Corn Law Rhymes. 
Robert Browning's Pauline; pubhshed 1833. 
Death of Sir Walter Scott. Death of Goethe. 



INDEX 



Born. Died. 

1672 Addison, Joseph, 182, 183, 187, 191, 192, 195 1719 

849 Alfred, King, 3, 15, 19, 23, 24, 27 901 

Fl. 1006 ^Ifric (Grammaticus) , 29 

FI. 1005 ^Ifric (Bata), 29 

908? ^thelwold. Bishop, 28 984 

1721 Akenside, Mark, 214, 219 1770 

735 Alcuin, 27 804 

Alexander, Sir W. (see Stirling, Earl of) .... . 

Fl. 1420 Andrew of Wyntoun, 91 

1555 Andrewes, Lancelot, 153, 154 1626 

1667 ilrbuthnot, Dr. John, 185 1735 

1822 Arnold, Matthew, 248 1888 

1515 Ascham, Roger, 84, 99 1568 

1775 Austen, Jane, 210 1817 

1561 Bacon, Sir Francis, 104, 108, 109, 123, 144, 152. .1626 

^7Z Baeda, 3, 7, 14, 15, 25, 26 735 

1816 Bailey, Philip, 247 

1316? Barbour, John, 91 1395 

1475? Barclay, Alexander, 88 1552 

1820 Barnes, William, 246 1886 

1630 Barrow, Isaac, 179 1677 

1615 Baxter, Richard, 154 1691 

1735 Beattie, James, 216, 220 1S03 

1584 Beaumont, Francis, 144-145 1616 

1616 Beaumont, Joseph, 159 1699 

1803 Beddoes, Thomas, 244 1849 

1640 Behn, Aphra, 194 1689 

269 



2/0 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Born. Died. 

628? Benedict, Biscop, 26 690 

1748 Bentham, Jeremy, 208 1832 

1662 Bentley, Richard, 182, 190 1742 

1685 Berkeley, Bishop, 188, 190 1753 

1388? Bemers, Juliana, 75 

1467 Berners, Lord, 83 1532 

1650? Blackmore, Sir Richard, 187 , 1729 

1699 Blair, Robert, 213 1746 

1757 • Blake, William, 222-224 1827 

Fl. 147J-1492. . . .Blind Harry, 91 

1766 Bloomfield, Robert, 225 1823 

1545 Bodley, Sir Thomas, 154 1613 

1678 Bolingbroke, Lord, 185, 190, 199 1751 

1740. Boswell, James, 199 1795 

1627 Boyle, Robert, 151 1691 

Broome, Richard, 148 1652? 

1554 Brooke, Lord (Fulke Greville), 123 1628 

1689 .Broome, William, 185 1745 

1778 Brown, Thomas, 208 1820 

1605 Browne, Sir Thomas, 154 1682 

1591 Browne, William, 157 1643 

1812 Browning, Robert, 224, 244, 247 1889 

1730 Bruce, James, 209 1794 

1746 Bruce, Michael, 221, 222 1767 

1628 .Buckingham, George Villiers, Duke of, 176, 

193 1687 

1628 Bunyan, John, 168 1688 

1729 Burke, Edmund, 199, 205 1797 

1643 Burnet, Bishop, 179, 182 1715 

1752 Bumey, Frances (Madame D'Arblay), 202. . . . 1840 

1759 Burns, Robert, 90, 222, 226, 243 1796 

1577 Burton, Robert, 154 1640 

1692 Butler, Bishop, 190 1752 

1612 Butler, Samuel, 174, 181 1680 

1788 Byron, Lord, 236, 237, 243, 244 .1824 

Fl. 670 Caedmon, 3, 12-19 

1551 Camden, William, 151 1623 

1777 Campbell, Thomas, 207, 235 1844 

Temj). Hen. VI.. Campeden, Hugh de, 75 

Campion, Thomas, 108 1619 



r.T^ 



INDEX 271 

Born. Died. 

1770 Canning, George, 207 1827 

1593 Capgrave, John, 75 1464 

1598? Carew, Thomas, 158 -1639? 

1795 Carlyle, Thomas, 206 iSSi 

1422? Caxton, William, 77, 7S, S6, 87 1491 

1748 Cecil, Richard, 208 1810 

1667? Centlivre, Susannah, 194 1723 

1780 Chalmers, Dr., 208 1847 

1559? Chapman, George, 117, 141-143 1634 

1619 Charleton, Walter, iSi 1707 

1752 Chatterton, Thomas, 217 1770 

1340 Chaucer, Geofeey, 34, 52, 61-70, 78, S6, 88, 90, 

91, 94, 216 1400 

1514 Cheke, Sir John, 82 1557 

Fi. 1430 Chestre, Thomas, 75 

1602 Chillingworth, William, 150, 153, 179 1644 

1731 Churchill, Charles, 214 1764 

1671 Cibber, Colley, 185, 195. 1757 

1609 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of, 150, 153. . . .1674 

1675 Clarke, Samuel, 190 "7^9? 

1819 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 248 1S61 

1772 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 122, 166, 206-208, 227, 

229, 230 1834 

1467? Colet, John, 82, 104 1519 

1650. Collier, Jeremy, 194 1726 

1676 Collins, Anthony, 190 1729 

1721 Collins, William, 157, 214, 220 1759 

1732. ... ... Colman, George (elder) , 195 1794 

1762 Colman, George (younger) , 195 1836 

1670. Congreve, William, 194, 195 1729 

1562 Constable, Henry, 119, 156 1613 

1577? Coryat, Thomas, 152 1617 

1630 Cotton, Charles, 117, 191 1687 

1571 Cotton, Sir Robert. 154 1631 

1488 Coverdale, Miles, 85 1568 

1618 Cowley, Abraham, 159, 172, 173, 182, 191 1667 

1731 Cowper, William, 90, 213, 222-225, 243 iSco 

1754 Crabbe, George, 222, 225 1S32 

1489 Cranmer, Thomas, 85 1556 

1613? Crashaw, Richard, 7, 157, 158 1649 

1617 Cudworth, Ralph, 179 1688 



2/2 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Born- Died. 

1732 Cumberland, Richard, 195 1811 

Fl. 8th century . .Cynewulf, 5-7, 12, 15, 19, 21, 22, 48, 49 

1562 Daniel, Samuel, 108, 119, 121, 152 1619 

1795 Darley, George, 244 1846 

1606 Davenant, Sir William, 148, 174, 193 1668 

Fl. 1623 Davenport, Robert, 148 

1569 Davies, Sir John, 123 1626 

Fl. 1606 I^ay, John, 143 

1661? Defoe, Daniel, 183, 187-189 1731 

1570? Dekker, Thomas, 141, 142 1641? 

1615 Denham, Sir John, 172, 173 1669 

1785 De Quincey, Thomas, 207 1859 

1573 Donne, John, 124, 157 1631 

1637 Dorset, Charles Sackville, Earl of, 177 1706 

1474? Douglas, Gawin, 90, 93 1522 

1563 Drayton, Michael, 119, 121, 122 1631 

1585 Drummond, of Hawthornden, William, 124, 157. 1649 

1631 Dryden, John, 68, 159, 168, 172-174, 178, 181, 

184, 193, 198, 216, 238 1700 

Du Jon Francis (see Junius) 

1465? ... Dunbar, William, 90, 92-94 i53oi* 

924 Dunstan, Archbishop, 28 -. 988 

1700? Dyer, John, 219 1758 

640? Ealdhelm, Abbot of Malmesbury, 3, 18 709 

1601? Earle, John, 153 1665 

Ecgberht, Archbishop, 27 766 

1767 Edgeworth, Maria, 210 1849 

1490? Elyot, Sir Thomas, 83 1546 

1467 Erasmus, 82, 87 1536 

1635? Etherege, Sir George, 194 1691 

1620 Evelyn, John, 182 1706 

Fairfax, Edward, 116 1635 

1678 Farquhar, George, 194 1707 

1683 Fenton, Elijah, 185 1730 

1750 Fergusson, Robert, 222 1774 

1782 Ferrier, Susan, 210 1854 

1707 Fielding, Henry, 195, 201 1754 

. , Filmer, Sir Rob3rt, 180 1653 



INDEX 273 

Born. Died. 

1459? Fisher, Bishop, 82 1535 

1809 Fitzgerald, Edward, 247 1883 

Flecknoe, Richard, 176 1678? 

Flemming, Robert, 80 1483 

1588? Fletcher, Giles, 157 1623 

1579 Fletcher, John, 139, 144, 145, 161. . .• 1625 

1582 Fletcher, Phineas, 157 1650 

Florence of Worcester, 39 1118 

1553? Florio, John, 117 1625 

1720 Foote, Samuel, 195 1777 

Fl . 1639 Ford, John, 147 

1394? Fortescue, Sir John, ^^ 1476? 

1516 Foxe, John, loi 1587 

1608 Fuller, Thomas, 153, 154 ... 1661 

Fl. 1140? Gaimar, Geoffrey, 41 

1717 Garrick, David, 195, 216 1779 

1661 Garth, Sir Samuel, 187 1719 

1525? Gascoigne, George, 99, 124 1577 

1085 Gay, John, 185, 187, 195, 222 1732 

mo? Geoffrey of Monmouth, 40, 44, 71 1154 

1737 Gibbon, Edward, 203 1794 

FJ. 1639 Glapthome, Henry, 148 

Gloucester, Humphrey, Duke of , 79 1446 

1756 Godwin, William, 210 1836 

1536? Golding, Arthur, 100 1605? 

1728 Goldsmith, Oliver, 195, 199, 202, 206, 220, 

221 1774 

1540 Googe, Bamaby, loi 1594 

1555 Gosson, Stephen, 108 1624 

1325? Gower, John, 58, 59, 69, 79 1408 

Grafton, Richard, 102, 152 1572? 

1716 G-ray, Thomas, 157, 174, 215-216, 219-221, 

235 1771 

1696 Green, Matthew, 187 1737 

1560? Greene, Robert, no, 131, 132, 134 , . . . 1592 

Greville, Fulke (see Brooke, Lord) 

Grey, William, Bishop cf Ely, 80 1478 

1519 Grimoald, Nicholas, 97 1562 

1446? Grocyn, William, 82 1519 

Gunthorpe, John, Dean of Wells, 80 1498 



2/4 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Born. Died. 

\1605 Habington, William, 159 1654 

1552? Hakluyt, Richard, 109 1616 

1584 Hales, John, 153, 179 1656 

1651 Halifax, Charles Montague, Lord, 177 1715 

1574 Hall, Joseph, Bishop of Norwich, 124, 153 1656 

1764 Hall, Robert, 208 1831 

1777. Hallam, Henry, 209 1859 

1677 Hanmer, Sir Thomas, 216 1746 

1378 Harding, John, 75 1465? 

1561 Harington, Sir John, 116 1612 

1611 Harrington, James, 123, 180 1677 

1705 Hartley, David, 203 1757 

1545? Harvey, Gabriel, loi, 108, no 1630 

1578 Harvey, William, 151 1657 

Hawes, Stephen, 86 1523? 

1745 Hayley, William, 209 1820 

1778 Hazlitt, V/illiam, 207 1830 

1793 Hemans, Felicia, 244 1835 

1084? Henry of Huntingdon, 40 1155 

1430? Henryson, Robert, 92 1506? 

1593 Herbert, George, 157, 158 1633 

1591 Herrick, Robert, 157-160, 219 1674 

1497? Heywood, John, 128 1580? 

Heywood, Thomas, 100 1650? 

Higden, Ranulf, 70 1364 

1588 Hobbes, Thomas, 123, 150, 153, 180 1679 

1370? Hoccleve, Thomas, 73 1450? 

1745 Holcroft, Thomas, 210 1809 

Holinshed, Raphael, 102 1580? 

1799 Hood, Thomas, 225 1845 

1554? Hooker, Richard, 109 1600 

1770? Hope, Thomas, 210 1831 

171 1 Hume, David, 202-205, 208 1776 

Hunnis, William, 120 1597 

1784 Hunt, Leigh, 241, 242 1859 

1694 Hutcheson, Francis, 203 1746 

1753 Inchbald, Elizabeth, 210 1821 

1394 James I. of Scotland, 91 1437 

1773 Jeffrey, Francis, 207 1850 

Fl. 1387 John of Trevisa, 70, 78 ^ . , , 



INDEX 275 

Born. Died. 

1709 Johnson, Samuel, 197, 198, 205, 213, 216 1784 

1573? Jonson, Ben, 109, 133, 141, 142, 144, 157, 160 . . . 1637 

1589 Junius (Francis du Jon), 16 1677 

i8th century ''Junius" (writer of the ''Letters," 1769- 

1772), 197, 205 

1795 Keats, John, 117, 228, 240-244 1821 

1792 Keble, John, 247 1866 

1637 Ken, Thomas, Bishop, 177 1711 

1819 Kingsley, Charles, 247 1875 

1550? Knolles, Richard, 152 1610 

1557? Kyd, Thomas, 131 1595? 

Lacy, John, 194 = 1681 

1775 Lamb, Charles, 123, 148, 207, 208 1834 

1802 Landon, Letitia Elizabeth ("L. E. L."), 244. .1838 

1775 Landor, Walter Savage, 207, 208 1864 

1735 Langhorn, Dr. John, 221 1779 

1330? Langland, William, 49, 52-58, loi .- 1400 

1485? Latimer, Hugh, Bishop of Worcester, 86 1555 

Fl. 1200 Layamon, 33, 34, 41-43. 48 

1757 Lee, Harriet, 210 1851 

1653? Lee, Nat, 194 1692 

1750 Lee, Sophia, 210 1824 

1506? Leland, John, 83 1552 

Leofric, Bishop of Exeter, 3 1072 

1616 L'Estrange, Sir Roger, 180 1704 

Lichfield, William, 75 1447 

1468? I'illy, William, 82 1522 

1771 Lingard, John, 209 1851 

1632 Locke, John, 123, 180 1704 

1794 Lockhart, John Gibson, 209, 210 1854 

1558? Lodge, Thomas, no, 120, 124 1625 

1618 Lovelace, Richard, 158 1658 

1370? Lydgate, John, 47,72,73, 78, 99, loi 1451? 

1554? ^y^Yi John, 106, 131 1606 

1490 Lyndsay, Sir David, 94, 95, 221 1555 

1765 Mackintosh, Sir James, 206 1832 

1697 Macklin, Charles, 195 1797 

1772 McCrie, Thomas, 209 1835 

1736 Macpherson, James, 217 1796 



27$ ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Born. Died. 

1705? Mallet, David, 216 1765 

FI. 1470 Malory, Sir Thomas, ^j 

1766 Malthus, Thomas, 209 1834 

1670? Mandeville, Bernard, 190 1733 

14th century . . . .Maundevile, Sir John, 70 

Fl. 1288-1388 .... Mannyng, of Brunne, Robert, 38, 51 

FJ. 1200 Map, Walter, 45 

1564 Marlowe, Christopher, 119, 120, 131-133, 143, 

222 1593 

1575?. Marston, John, 124, 141, 142 1634 

1621 Marvell, Andrew, 157, 161, 174, 175, 219 1678 

1583 Massinger, Philip, 146 1640 

Matthew Paris, 39 1259 

159s ^ay, Thomas, 153 1650 

1735 Mickle, William, 221 1788 

1570? Middleton, Thomas, 146 1627 

1773 Mill, James, 209 1836 

1608 Milton, John, 16, 90, 96, 144, 155, 161-168, 171, 

173, 219, 224 1674 

1300? Minot, Laurence, 51 1352? 

1744 Mitford, William, 209 1827 

Montague, Charles (see Halifax, Lord) 

1779 Moore, Thomas, 209, 236 1852 

1614 More, Henry, 159 1687 

1478 More, Sir Thomas, 40, 82, 83 1535 

1649 Mulgrave, John Sheffield, Earl of, 177 1721 

1727 Murphy, Arthur, 195 1805 

Fl. 1638 Nabbes, Thomas, 148 

1567 Nash, Thomas, 108, 131 1601 

Fl. 1375 Nassington, William of, 75 

1620 Nevile, Henry, 180 1694 

1642 Newton, Sir Isaac, 17S 1727 

1725 Newton, John, 208 1807 

Fl. 1250 Nicholas of Guildford, 50 

Fl. 1390 Nicholas of Hereford, 57 

1535? North, Sir Thomas, 117 1601? 

1532 Norton, Thomas, 75, 129 1584 

1653 Oldham, John, 177 1683 

1769 Opie, Amelia, 210 1853 



INDEX 277 

Born. Died. 

1075 Ordericus Vitalis, 39 1143^ 

Fl. 1200 Orrmin, 42 

Oswald of Worcester, 28 972 

1652 Otway, Thomas, 194 1685 

1581 Overbury, Sir Thomas, 153 1613 

1737 Paine, Thomas, 206 1809 

1540? Painter, William, 102 1594 

1743 Paley, William, 208 1805 

1504 Parker, Archbishop, 151 1575 

1679 Parnell, Thomas, 185 1718 

1823 Patmore, Coventry, 246 

1395? Pecock, Reginald, 77 1460? 

1558? Peele, George, no, 131, 135 1597? 

1633 Pepys, Samuel, 182 1703 

1729 Percy, Thomas, Bishop, 216, 223 1811 

1623 Petty, Sir William, 151, 180 1687 

1510? Phaer, Thomas, 100 1560 

1675? Phillips, Ambrose, 187 1749 

1676 Phillips, John, 187 1709 

Phreas, John, 80 1465 

1667 Pomfret, John, 187 1702 

1500 Pole, Reginald, 104 1558 

1688 Pope, Alexander, 173, 175, 176, 181, 184-188, 

190, 198, 200, 213, 216, 219, 222 1744 

1664 Prior, Matthew, 177, 185, 187 1721 

1600 Prynne, William, 155 1669 

1577 Purchas, Samuel, 152 1626 

Fl. 15th century. Purvey, John, 57 After 1427 

1530? Puttenham, George, 107 1600? 

1592 Quarles, Francis, 159 1644 

1764 Radcliffe, Ann, 210 1823 

1552 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 114, 115, 152 1618 

1686 Ramsay, Allan, 1S7, 221, 222 1758 

1605 Randolph, Thomas, 148 1634 

1710 Reid, Thomas, 203 • 1796 

1723 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 199 1792 

1772 Ricardo, David, 209 1823 



2/8 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Born. Died. 
1689 Richardson, Samuel, 200 1761 

Ripley, George, 75 1490 

Fl. 1295 Robert of Gloucester, 44 

1721 Robertson, William, 202 1793 

Fl. 1551 Robinson, Ralph, 83 

1647 Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of, 177 1680 

1509? • • • • .Rogers, John, 85 1555 

1763 .Rogers, Samuel, 228, 235 1855 

Rolle, of Hampole, Richard, 38 1349 

1634 Roscommon, Dillon Wentworth, Earl of, 177. . . 1684 

1828 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 249 1882 

1830 Rossetti, Christina, 249 1894 

1674 Rowe, Nicholas, 195 , . 1718 

Fl. 17th century. . Rowley, William, 148 

Roy, William, 85 1531 

1636 ... .Russell, Lady Rachel, 182 1723 

1536 Sackville, Thomas, Lord Buckhurst, 95, 96, 99, 

100, 129 1608 

St. John, Henry (see Bolingbroke, Lord) 

1577 Sandys, George, 152 1644 

1697 Savage, Richard, 214 1743 

Savile, George (see Halifax, Lord) 

1747 Scott, Thomas, 208 1821 

1771 Scott, Sir Walter, 90, 206, 210-212, 216, 228, 

234 1832 

1639 Sedley, Sir Charles, 177, 194 1701 

1584- Selden, John, 151, 152 1654 

Sellynge, William, 80 

1640 Shadwell, Thomas, 176, 194 1692 

1671 Shaftesbury, Anthony, Earl of, 190 1713 

1564 Shakespeare, William, 82, 90, 96, 98, 117-121, 

130-142, 161, 170-172, 193, 212, 216, 218 1616 

1792 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 22, 228, 236, 238-244. . .1822 

1714 Shenstone, William, 216, 221 1763 

1751 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 195 1816 

1641 Sherlock, William, 179 1707 

1596 Shirley, James, 148, 160 1666 

Fl. 1440 Shirley, John, 78 

1577 Sibbes, Richard, 154 1635 

1622 Sidney, Algernon, 180 1683 



INDEX 279 

Born. Died. 

1554 Sidney, Sir Philip, 102. io6-ic8, iii, 115. 119 . .1586 

Fl. nth and j Simeon of Durham, 39 

1 2th centuries ' 

1460? Skelton, John, 79, 87. 88, 95. ._ 1528? 

1722 Smart, Christopher, 221 1771 

1723 Smith, Adam, 204 1790 

1512 Smith, Sir Thomas, 82 1577 

1771 Smith, Sydney, 207 1845 

1721 Smollett, Tobias, 201 1771 

1633 South, Robert, 179 1716 

1660 Southeme, Thomas, 194 1746 

1774 Southe}^, Robert, 207, 209, 227-229 1843 

1560? Southwell, Robert, 118 .1595 

1552 Speed, John, 151 1629 

1562 Spelman, Sir Henry, 151 1641 

1552? Spenser, Edmund, 91, 95, 99, 107, 110-117, 119. 

122, 157, 170, 216, 222 1599 

1672 Steele, Sir Richard, 191, 192 1729 

1713 Sterne, Laurence, 201, 202 1768 

1753 Stewart, Dugald, 208 1828 

1635 .... Stillingfleet, Edward, 17; 1699 

1567? Stirling, Sir William Alexander, Earl of, 124, 

^':^7 1640 

1525 Stow, John, 102, 152 1605 

1609 Suckling, Sir John, 148, 158 1642 

1516? Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of, 86, 88, 95-97. .1547 

1667 Swift, Jonathan, 183, 185, 188, 189, 198 1745 

1837 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 7 

1613 Taylor, Jeremy, 153 1667 

1628 Temple, Sir William, 182, 191 1699 

1809 Tennyson, Alfred, 5. 7, 20. 41, 67. 224, 244, 246, 

247 1892 

1688 Theobald, Lewis, 185, 216 1744 

1225? Thomas of Erceldoune, 91 1300? 

1700 Thomson, James, 94. 157, 188, 219, 235 174S 

1686 Tickell, Thomas, 187 1740 

1630 Tillotson, John, Archbishop, 179 1694 

1656 Tindal, Matthew, 190 1733 

1670 Toland, John, 190 1722 

Fl. 1551 Tottel, Richard, 97, ico 



28o ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Born. Died. 

Fl. 1600-1613 Tourneur, Cyril, 143 , 

1530? Turbervile, George, loi, 102 1594? 

1808 Turner, Charles Tennyson, 246 1S79 

Turpin, Archbishop, 45 

1526? Tusser, Thomas, 97 1580 

1484? Tyndale, William, 83, 84 1536 

1505 Udall, Nicholas, 129 1556 

1580 Ussher, Archbishop, 15 1656 

1666? Vanbrugh, Sir John, 194 1726 

1621 Vaughan, Henry, 159, 219 1693 

1120? Wace, 41 1184? 

1605 Waller, Edmund, 159, 172, 173 1687 

1616 Wallis, John, 151 1703 

1717 Walpole, Horace, 199 1797 

1676 Walpole, Sir Robert, 197 1745 

1593 Walton, Izaak, 155, 182 1683 

1698 Warburton, William, Bishop, 185, 190, 216 1779 

1460 Warham, Archbishop, 82. 1532 

1558? Warner, William, 121 1609 

1722. Warton, Joseph, 220 1800 

1728 Warton, Thomas, 207, 216, 220 ; . 1790 

Fl. i6th century. Webbe, William, 107 

1582? Webster, John, 144, 146 1652? 

1708 Wesley, Charles, 224 1788 

1703 Wesley, John, 20S '. . .1791 

1714 Whitfield, George, 208 1770 

1720 White, Gilbert, 200 1793 

1727 Wilkes, John, 197 1797 

1095 ^ William of Malmesbury, 39 1 142? 

Fl. 1327 William of Shoreham, 38 

Fl. 13th century. William of Waddington, 38 

1785 Wilson, Professor John (Christopher i^orui), 

207 1854 

1520? Wilson, Thomas, 97 1581 

1588 Wither, George, 157, 159, 161 1667 

1659 Wollaston, William, 190 1724 

Worcester, John Tiptoft, Earl of, 79 1470 

1770 Wordsworth, William, 92, 118, 207, 221, 223, 225, 

227, 230-234, 239, 243 1850 



INDEX 281 

Born. Died. 

1568 Wotton, Sir Henry, 92, 123, 152 1639 

Fi. 1002-1023. . . .Wulfstan, Archbishop, 29 

1503 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 86, 88, 95, 96 1542 

1640? Wycherley, William, 194 1715 

1320? Wyclif, John, 52,53, 57 1384 

1681 Young, Edward, 213 1765 



INDEX TO FOREIGN AUTHORS 



Born. " Died. 
1474 Ariosto, no, 116 1533 

1313 Boccaccio, 61, 62, 74, 80, 99 1375 

1434 = . . . .Boiardo, no 1494 

1636 Boileau, 172 1711 

Calprenede, 192 1663 

1424 Chalcondylas, 82. . , 1511 

Fl. nth century, .Chrestien of Troyes, 44 

106 B.c Cicero, 94, 100 43 B.C. 

Contarini, 104 1550 

1606 Corneille, 192 1684 

1717 D'Alembert, 197 1783 

1265 Dante, 61, 62, 70 1321 

Dares Phrygius, 47 

385 B.c Demosthenes, 100 322 B.C. 

Dictys Cretensis, 47 

1713 Diderot, 197 1784 

1749 Goethe, 198, 206. 211 1832 

13th ceninry Guido delle Colonne, 47 

Homer, 117, 143, 186, 224 

65 B.c Horace, 163 8 B.C. 

1621 La Fontaine, 172 1695 

1729 Lessing, 192, 206 1781 

1496 Marot, III 1544 

1280? Meung, Jean de, 59 

282 



INDEX 283 

Born. Died. 

1622 .Moliere, 193 1673 

1533 .Montaigne, 117, 191 1592 

1689 Montesquieu, 197, 202 1755 

43 B.c Ovid, 94, 100 17 A.D. 

1304 Petrarca, 58, 61, 80, 96, 116 . .' ... 1374 

427 B.c Plato, 96 347 B.C. 

Fl. 50-100 Plutarch, ibo. 

1639 Racine, 193 1699 

Fl. i2th century. .Robert of Boron, 44 

1712 Rousseau, 197 1778 

1458 Sannazaro, 102 1530 

1759 Schiller, 198 1805 

1601 Scudery, 192 1667 

Fl. 930 Skallagrimsson, Egil, 24 

45? Statius, 47 96? 

1544 Tasso, no, 116 1595 

70 B.c Virgil, 7, 47, 93, 96, 100, 177 19 B.C. 

1694 Voltaire, 132, 135, 195, 197, 202 1778 



THE HISTORY 

OF 

EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

Being the History of English Poetry from its 'Beginnings to the 
Accession of King /Efred. 

BY THE 

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A HISTORY 

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